Hi all,
This is my first post - sorry if it's a duplicate, or if I end up missing any information that's usually expected.
I'm teaching a course that includes group assignments, but where I want to be able to adjust the marks that individuals within a group get to account for varying levels of contribution.
Our planned marking scheme is:
- For group assignments, we’ll first mark the entire group’s submission out of 50 using a rubric with point ranges. So, for example, group 1 might end up with a mark of 30/50.
- We then assign each individual within the group an individual adjustment mark in
recognition of how much they contributed relative to the rest of the group.
This has an intended range of -12 to +12. So, say, if Sue (a member of group 1)
contributed little to the project relative to her group-mates, she might get an
individual adjustment mark of -6, and end up with a final mark of 30-6 -=
24/50*.
The problem: How can I implement this kind of marking
structure in moodle?
I’ve tried a bunch of stuff in a sandbox site I have, but having
a marking criterion/category that can accept negative marks without unwanted
side effects is really tricky. I can add an "individual adjustment" criterion to a marking guide or rubric, and that accepts either positive or negative marks... but entering a maximum mark of 12 for this then has the unintended side effect of increasing the total that the assignment is marked out of from 50 to 62. Adding an individual adjustment mark as a separate grading item doesn't work either, because grading items can't accept negative marks.
The only real solution I’ve found so far is to use the marking guide to mark the group submissions, then have the markers decide the individual adjustment marks, calculate the final mark for each student themselves (group mark +- individual adjustment), and then manually override the group submission mark with each student’s final mark in the gradebook. This works but is clunky and has a lot of potential for human error, so really isn’t ideal.
Does anyone have any thoughts about how this might be solvable? What would really be ideal is the capacity to add an "extra credit" type criterion to the marking guide that doesn't affect the total the assignment is marked out of, and that can accept positive or negative marks. But I don't think that's possible.
I don't know the version of Moodle I'm using I'm afraid - my university uses a customised version called Stream, and I can't work out how to get the version number.
*In the unlikely case of the combination of a group score plus an individual adjustment resulting in a mark higher than the intended maximum of 50, the final mark would remain at 50.
