Just starting a thought on the visibility of grade items on creation and reset.
A scenario:
We had a course coordinator contact us asking why grades and feedback had been made available to students, having been assured that they would not be until they gave the go-ahead. It turns out that normally the gradebook item is set to hidden to embargo the release. This is *meant* to be done by the administrative team. What appears to have happened is that, following the course reset at the start of the year, the activity was updated to reflect the new submission dates etc but the grade item (which is in a completely different place) was not set back to hidden. Thus when the grades and feedback were set, they all instantly appeared to the students.
This makes me wonder if there should/could there be a setting in the standard grade elements part of an activity that sets the initial state of the corresponding grade item.
This would then also be observed during the course reset process to put the activity and grade book back into a known state, whilst still leaving it up to individual teachers to determine what that state should be...