Grade item Feedback not hidden, when the grade is hidden

Grade item Feedback not hidden, when the grade is hidden

by Ray Hinton -
Number of replies: 0

Hello Moodlers,

I have set up a simple test course, to investigate something I notice happening in other courses. Basically, under a certain combination of settings, "Feedback" on a category grade item is visible when I would expect it to be hidden.

The course has four total assignments, split into two categories. We have a use case where we want to:

  • temporarily hide the grade for one of the assignments at the end of a course
  • subsequently, that category grade and the Course total grade need to be hidden
  • we also add Feedback to the Course total grade.

To accomplish this, we use these settings:

  • Overview report
    • Hide totals if they contain hidden items = Hide
  • User report
    • Show hidden items = Show hidden
    • Hide totals if they contain hidden items = Hide

Then, we go into "Gradebook setup", and hide the assignment grade.

Because of the combination of settings above, if a student looks at their User report, they see a row for the assignment, category total, and Course total, but they do not see the grades. Further, they do not see the feedback for the assignment. That is expected.

However, the student CAN see feedback that is added to the Course total grade. Again, at this point, the student cannot see a numerical grade for the Course total. I would expect that if the grade is not visible, the feedback would not be visible, either.

Please observe the following screenshot. The two boxes show that:

  1. The Course total grade is hidden.
  2. The Feedback for that grade is not hidden.

Am I misinterpreting one of these settings? Is this the intended behavior? Is "Hide totals if they contain hidden items" conceptually different than setting the Grade item to Hidden? Thank you to anyone who can help me emerge from this confusion! smile

screenshot of a test student viewing a user report, with a hidden grade but the corresponding feedback visible

[Aside: There are some weird things happening with the calculated weights, which I did not intend to investigate, but I figured I would point out anyway. Observe that the "Assignments" category calculated weight is not being shown (it should be 40%), and the "Term paper outline" assignment weight is also not being shown (it should be 10%). This only happens when I have the one assignment hidden. All the weights show properly when all the assignments are visible. I am not particularly looking for feedback on this, but maybe it provides a clue to someone.]