Moodle in English: Hiding grade from users

Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Wednesday, December 18, 2019, 7:31 AM

v3.7

I am having trouble trying to hide grades from users. We are using the course as part of an interview process and we use multiple assessments, but clicking on the assessment from the teachers/admin point of view it says:

Grading summary

Hidden from students

In the Gradebook Setup, the entire course grades have been hidden, as per https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Grade_hiding, but users need to see feedback but not grades, how do I achieve this?

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Emma Richardson - Wednesday, December 18, 2019, 8:57 PM

Feedback is linked to grades so you will have to reeanble them. Another option would be to use the forum to collect their assessments and then discuss there.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Wednesday, December 18, 2019, 9:08 PM

Wow, so you can't just hide grades???

I have also tried setting "Show gradebook to students = No" in the course appearance settings.

How to we grade using the forum? Obviously, multiple users are using this system and they should not be able to interact or see other comments. Currently the assessment nearly work (if we could just hide the grade). We tried the free form quiz, but no there was some issue were either the interviewee or interviewer were not notified of submissions.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Shirley Gregorczyk - Wednesday, December 18, 2019, 10:47 PM

If you consider my method below, I recommend creating a test course and test all the settings from a student and teacher role before making any changes.

You could set up a multiple activity course that you are using to collect basic quiz results, and then use Assignment to collect another set of evaluation data.
Gradebook Setup - create a category with both activities - and your passing score value that is the Course Total.
Hide the entire Category - For the Category settings, the checkbox Exclude empty grades must be selected.
Only display the Course Total to the student.
Course requires restrictions - Hide Assignment until Quiz receives a passing grade.
In the Quiz settings, review responses conditions, deselect the Marks checkbox. (this hides the quiz results from the students Grades view)
For the assignment, you need to deploy Advance Grading - you will be able to construct evaluation questions with ratings (1-5 or 1-10) and the teacher has a Feedback area. In the settings you can determine if teacher and/or student can view the feedback.
Kind Regards

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Emma Richardson - Wednesday, December 18, 2019, 10:49 PM

You can hide grades but, as you have found out, it also hides feedback. You can set the grade for each activity to no grade and add feedback but you need to enable the gradebook for them to access the feedback. You could use separate groups with the forum and put each interviewee in their own group which would be like them having their own forum area.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Friday, December 20, 2019, 5:55 PM

@emma Actually, my problem is even more bizarre. Even with all of the gradebook switched off and the "Show gradebook to students = No" in the course appearance settings, all that happen is that the students (er, interviewees) are not emailed WRT to feedback submissions from the interviewers (nor do they see any notifications for submitted feedback in their online notification tray), so we need to reach out to them independently to say "Hey , you have feedback". They STILL see both grades AND feedback in the assignment task. It would see that whatever I'm doing, I'm doing it wrong (although I believe I am correctly following the documentation).

Still, I get what you are saying about the Feedback and Grades being in link, that that should I ever manage to fix this issue, then I still won't get what I'm after.

I will look at the forum although I have a suspicion to that his will not give what I'm after. We need eventually to have a workflow to marking where multiple teachers (Interviewers) will mark the candidates then we can colate marks or our own references. It is very useful for historical mean to ensure that all of these are gather in one place. At the moment, we copy out the content and email it around, and I have already lost count of who said what about whom.

@shirley - I need to re-read your comments again for them to sink in. The problem we had with quizes is that teachers (interviewers) were not notified of submissions from the students (interviewees) when we used the open text quiz response. This lead to delays in responding to interviewees.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Mary Cooch - Friday, December 20, 2019, 11:09 PM

@Chris - I just spotted your duplicate posts so I removed them for you.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Wednesday, December 25, 2019, 7:23 AM

Hi Emma,

I did look at the forum activity, unfortunately the way users are enrolled into the course is currently via an application called Arlo, which we use to funnel eLearning sign ups into Moodle and assign them to the correct course. This only assigns users into a single group. I suppose we don't need to use Arlo for this particular exercise, although it works very well for us with zero admin.

To give you a better understanding for what we are doing, the technique we use to interview is to role play. We setup several customer scenarios which need to be troubleshooted, and the interviewee must respond to help the customer resolve those issues. This is where we use the assignment activity. We give the user 2 attempts to resolves the customers issue. They will submit their first answer, then the "customer" will responded to elicit further information if required. Each scenario has its own assignment activity.

In general, the assignment is OK. I would like to see this threaded (I suppose similar to your suggestion of a forum) so there is a clear understanding of progression by all markers (this is quite hidden when looking at multiple assignment submissions). Responses need a hard cut off (maximum two responses per scenario), and the ability to mark/grade the overall response (over both submissions, if used). I have started looking at the advance grading methods for the assignment (as per @sheilas response) as this will certainly help others mark the assignments to a consistent level, although I suppose something offline could be used if we use some other activity.

The main goals are to:

Provide consistency between marking interviewees.
Limit interviewees to their answer when posted (so no editing after the fact)
Limit the number of answers (to two)
Make it easy for multiple markers to view and mark the responses, potentially independently.
Provide feedback on responses to the interviewees, and record grades assigned, but to ensure that those grades are hidden from the user (which is of course the reason behind this particular post).
Notifications to both students (interviewees) and teachers (interviewers) - the Quiz activity with free word answer fails here when teachers comment, the students never get a email notification (what I said previously was the wrong way round)

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Friday, December 27, 2019, 6:28 PM

Hi @Emma,

The more I think about the use of forums, the more I like the idea. I have multiple interviewers (who are way cleverer than I) that are absolutely bamboozled by Moodles grading WRT to assignments and the non-threaded nature of multiple assignment attempts. In v3.8 I understand that a forum can use an advanced grading mechanism, so this might provide the structure I need to rank candidates, and the threaded nature of a forum should allow a simple overview of the discussion.

I'm just about to upgrade our demo Moodle platform to test out some functionalities. As far as I can then see, I now need to setup the following:

A course with groups (never used groups before)
A group for each candidate (ideally a simple way to enable random group generation and enrolment would be required in the future).
An individual forum for each scenario. I need ensure that we can pre-populate a question into each forum so that a candidate can just reply. Never used forums in anger before either, so this is all going to be fun.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Monday, December 30, 2019, 12:23 AM

@emma, Well, I am struggling with this

Whilst the idea of the forum seems like a good one, I can't seem to make it work on multiple fronts.

As you mentioned, each user would need to be in their own group and ideally this should happen automatically at enrolment. It would seem like the auto creation of groups with single user is not great. You can only define group names based on letters or numbers. I see there have been many attempts in the past to get Moodle to add this functionality, but for some reason it was rejected.

On the actual forum, it would seem like the Q and A forum would be ideal as I do not want users to post messages simply reply to a predefined question. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with "Separate Groups" only "Visible groups", as the students do not get a reply option when the forum is set as seperate groups. (Edit - I see that a post to "All Participant" will not be able to be responded to by users in groups, and the only way to do this is to post to "All Groups", but this only works for currently active groups, not future groups

)

Further, the maximum edit time for posts only seems to be editable at a global site level, so I can't stop users from editing posts on these specific forums without affecting everything on the site.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Monday, December 30, 2019, 1:38 PM

Progress

. I have now managed to setup individual groups and a reasonably simple way to enroll into the course/group (although not quite as automated as I would like). Still, a step in the right direction.

I now have a Forum where Each person posts one discussion, and that is in response to the Forum description that contain the customer scenario. I even went full out an created a decent Rubric to grade the response..... BUT, I still end up with the user seeing their grade and worse, seeing the Rubrik prior to them posting. I unticked all the boxes on the Rubric, but still the thing shows. I completely get the idea that this is very useful for students to understand where the mark comes from, but I just do not want it show in this example, and I expect there are other out there with the same requirement for certain situations.

On the plus side, the Forum grading and structure is a million times better that the Assignment WRT to understanding the nature of the response(s), and the email notifications both students and teachers get. So, this is good, I just need to hide them blooming grade still.

Back to @Shirley Gregorczyk post I guess.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 1:32 AM

After yet more work, I couldn't get @Shirley Gregorczyk to resolve the issue.

The Rubrics that are applied to the forums are setup as such:

The gradebook has ALL grades hidden:

However, the users can still see:

And this means that the student can see the full Rubric before doing anything (which has been explicitly disabled via the Rublick options) and also their marks immediately.

I have got to be doing something wrong, surely?

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Shirley Gregorczyk - Thursday, January 2, 2020, 10:33 PM

Hello,
I have never used Forums, so I am not the best resource for how that module works. I use Assignment module and its' functionality to base my answer.
Even when I hid the Grades in the Gradebook, I found I needed to explore settings within the activity itself to truly hide the Grade.
For a Quiz activity I needed to deselect the Marks checkbox. Otherwise the quiz grade was displayed on the Student's Grades view even thought the Gradebook>Grade Item and category was hidden. Once my students see a grade they stop engaging in the course. So this was a problem, I needed to resolve.
I confess, this was a mind-bender for several days. I had to examine the Moodle Documentation pages for Quiz and Gradebook to see where the disconnect was.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Friday, January 3, 2020, 2:07 AM

Thanks @shirley for this. I'm beginning to think this might be a bug in the Moodle code, especially given that this is a new feature introduced in v3.8. There is nothing I can see in the "Whole forum grading" section of the forum that might help, and I can't see any other areas of the activity that might have an interaction.

As for the use of the forum, indeed, I only started to look at the forum from @emma's suggestion. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it as these particular examples replicate an email flow between a customer and the support person. The ability to apply a rubric now to a forum is great as this allows non-teaching engineers an ability to not only engage in the back and forth process on the interview question via the forum itself, but to see all of the back and forth activity from a candidate in one page and then formatively and qualitatively score a candidate. I have also posted a test exemplar answer so that our back end engineers can read to see what might be the perfect answer, and if we so want to, we can then add a user to that group so that they could see the answer as well and understand where they might have missed out.

The only small glitch I would like to iron out is an ability to automatically create an individual group for a new enrollee, and then assign them to that group, but this has nothing to do with the thread of this topic.

Re: Hiding grade from users

by Chris Swinney - Friday, January 3, 2020, 6:05 PM

This has been raised as an issue on the Moodle Tracker and triaged as a major level. Hopefully it will be fixed before v3.8.1 is released, although that is only a couple of weeks away I believe.

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-67607