An assignment was set to marking workflow. Teachers manually entered the grades into the gradebook rather than the assignment activity grading page. Students have seen their grades even though the marking workflow was not set to Released. Help! This is a major problem for us- is this a bug in the marking workflow?
Please advise ASAP. We are using Moodle 3.4
Off the top of my head (and a quick glance at the code backs this up), the point of the marking workflow is to control when the grades are released to the gradebook, at which point they are visible to the students.
If a teacher bypasses the assignment completely and types the grades directly into the gradebook, then the grades are available to the students immediately - the marking workflow cannot stop this, as it has not been involved in the process.
You might be able to manually mark the grades as hidden, then manually unhide them when they should be released (but this won't stop students who have already seen them from knowing their grade).
Many thanks for your swift and helpful response. I think it would be helpful if it's not a bug that this was made explicit in the documentation for the marking workflow.
Is there anywhere on moodle.org I could raise this?
This is a big problem for our institution as we are using the marking workflow as the recommended method. Despite using Moodle since 2004, I did not foresee this happening and thought the marking workflow would be bulletproof.
Carol
Please note I did not write the feature, nor have I been involved in the planning of it, so I am only going on how it works in the code (so anything I'm stating here could be mistaken).
I would argue that the marking workflow is pretty bulletproof, unless you have teachers who don't use it (at which point, there is nothing it can really do, as direct overriding of grades in the gradebook is out of its control). Maybe you could remove the capability 'moodle/grade:override' from teachers, if they cannot be trusted not to bypass the marking workflow?
However, if you feel the documentation can be improved then it is possible to edit it yourself - just visit the relevant page, click 'login', then create an account (if you don't already have one) and you should then be able to update the page.
I will look into changing permissions for 'moodle/grade:override' from
teachers and see what the implications are.
I will also edit the documentation if I can.
Thanks for the support!