On this page:
https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Upgrading#Possible_issues_that_may_affect_you_in_Moodle_2.8
I see:
"Any courses previously using either 'Sum of grades' and/or 'Aggregate including subcategories' may have some changes to grades. Thus it is recommended that grades in the gradebook are reviewed for such courses."
Unfortunately, I missed this notation until last week, when it was pointed out to me in the Moodle Gradebook Working Group.
This has caused significant concern in our organization and we have postponed upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8 during our only immediate window of opportunity (the week of March 29-April 4). Our next window will be June 28 to July 4, so now we are risking a security bug being discovered between May 11, when 2.6 is EOL, and June 28. Before that time, we need to understand what the impact of this change is expected to be and how we can mitigate it. While Moodle is not our system of record for grades, it is a reference system in the case of grade challenges, and in some cases students continue to access courses past the end of the term. We run 4 terms per year with very little "down time" between them, usually only 1 week. With hundreds of courses running each term and about 20 courses with up to 30 students in each known to be using "Sum of grades" aggregation, we can't ask our instructors to go back and inspect courses from prior terms to determine whether the individual grades have changed.
How are other institutions handling this? Someone suggested to me that we could lock the grades from courses prior to the upgrade, but there isn't, so far as I know, a feature in Moodle to do this, so we would have to get permission from our hosting provider to run a SQL script, which we would also have to write and test.
I am really quite surprised that the decision was made at Moodle HQ to replace "Sum of grades" with a new aggregation expected to alter the grades of some previous courses, rather than deprecating "Sum of grades" but keeping the historical calculation/aggregation method in place. Similarly, I am surprised that the column storing the "Aggregate
including subcategories" function was removed from the database, rather than simply removing that feature from the GUI.
On the other hand, I wrote a query using Configurable Reports and I see very few cases in which final grades are actually altered between the two aggregation methods.
What, specifically, is supposed to trigger a change? Is there a more specific query I can use to identify affected courses?
Thanks in advance for any help,
Elizabeth Dalton
Granite State College