Hello!
I am having an issue with grade book aggregation in Moodle 3.3. I am a design specialist, and I know what I want our courses to do, but I am not a computer programmer. I am providing a link to this post for a system admin to also follow.
We have over a hundred course shells on our server and several thousand students.
Here is the issue:
We need an accurate current grade to report for students that are moving at varying paces through the course. Flexible pace students need to be able to work ahead and have their grade calculate accurately even if other students are working behind them. All students, both traditional and flexible pace, need to have a zero reported for empty grades once the due date has passed.
We function on quarterly grading periods with a semester exam and semester final grade. We have created categories for each quarter and the exams. We use calculated grade items to report these overall grades to our student information system.
Our quarterly categories include a main folder of all assignments for that quarter with blanks not included in the calculation. We recently added a sub category folder for when an assignment deadline passes, teachers move items there and blanks will count as zeros. The goal is to allow students working ahead to see their grade, but not penalize students on pace.
We have tried various aggregations, and two have been the most promising, but neither work exactly the way we need.
Option 1:
Quarter Category Folder = Simple Weighted Mean of grades; this provides an overall percentage to report to our grade calculation column for the SIS. Sub category (Graded Assignments) = Natural aggregation (this prevents the folder from inaccurately weighting the grades that are placed into it.) Problem: there is a miscalculation in the parent category folder for the assignments ranging from .5%-5% maybe greater.
Option 2:
Quarter Category Folder = Natural; this resolves the issue in Option 1 and the percentage calculates correctly. Problem: the calculated grade item column that reports to our SIS only shows the running total of points and not a percentage which is what our students and clients need to see there.
I have added a PDF of screen shots for a better view.
Considerations:
- We use a calculation of =1-9wk for the first nine weeks column to pull the total from that folder. I can't think of a hard calculation to use there since the running total of points changes for students depending on their pace.
- We discovered that the User report was showing the correct calculation for the nine weeks category folder because we had a setting at the admin level to not include hidden grades. When we changed that the user report then matched the teacher report which is unfortunately the wrong calculation. I have looked everywhere for a hidden assignment that might be causing this. None to be found.
