Rescaling quiz grades discretely

Rescaling quiz grades discretely

by Michael Seifert -
Number of replies: 5

I am using Moodle to administer a series of "warm-up" quizzes for a class.  The quizzes will vary somewhat in length, but will usually contain 3–5 questions, some with subparts (using Cloze).  

To make these assignments lower-stakes, I would like to assign points to the quizzes as follows:

  • 3 points if between 50% and 100% of the "raw" points were earned
  • 2 points if between 0% and 50% of the "raw" points were earned
  • 1 point if an attempt was made, but no "raw" points were earned

Ideally I'd like Moodle to do these calculations for me and feed these rescaled scores (rather than some linearly rescaled raw score) into the gradebook automatically.  Maybe (I can dream, can't I?) Moodle could even display these discrete scores after the student submits their attempt and sees how they did, either alongside or in place of the "raw" points earned.

Is there any way to do this?  I'm an end user, not an administrator, so something I can do on my own would be best.   But if there's a plugin that can do this, let me know, and I can try to cajole our admin into installing it.

(I think the version of Moodle my college is using is 3.8 — that's where the documentation links take me when I click on them from our local Moodle pages.)

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In reply to Michael Seifert

Re: Rescaling quiz grades discretely

by Dominique Bauer -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
Hello Michael,

If I understood your question correctly, you can do all of this yourself with the Grade calculations ↗, which are easy to use and work very well.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Dominique Bauer

Re: Rescaling quiz grades discretely

by Michael Seifert -

Hey there Dominique!  I thought about that, but it's not optimal for a few reasons:

  • As far as I can tell, I can't apply a calculation to the "raw" grades, only to the category average.  This means that the students will still see the "raw" grades in the gradebook for each quiz, rather than the actual number of points they earned.  Only the category grade can be changed in this way (which is admittedly better than nothing.)
  • I intend to administer about 20–30 of these quizzes over the course of the class, which will make for a cumbersome process:  for each quiz I create, I'll have to manually add an ID number to each quiz when I create it, and then edit the calculation.  I intend to drop some number of the lowest grades, which adds to the complexity of the required calculation. This seems tedious and prone to error.  
I was hoping there was some way I could (effectively) map numerical grades to a scale, rather than a number, on the level of each quiz and then feed that scale into the gradebook.  Then I could just set the category average to "Mean of grades, drop N lowest" and forget about it.

That said, if there's a way to make grade calculations more automated when you have large numbers of items in a calculation, I'd be grateful to hear about that as well.
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In reply to Michael Seifert

Re: Rescaling quiz grades discretely

by Dominique Bauer -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
Hello Michael,

I can't apply a calculation to the "raw" grades, only to the category average.
No. Go to Grades / Setup and, at the bottom of the page, click on "Add a grade item". Give the item a name and select a Grade type, then save the changes. Back to the Gradebook setup, move the item where you want, then click on its Edit / Edit calculation. Create the formula according to your needs. You can also try out the different Grading types and hidding options.
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In reply to Dominique Bauer

Re: Rescaling quiz grades discretely

by Michael Seifert -
Ah, perhaps I wasn't clear in my original post. The quizzes are administered via the Moodle Quiz Module, and the gradebook items in question are those automatically created in the gradebook when I create the quiz.  When I attempt to edit these, I can only "Edit Settings" (see screenshot below.)  This happens regardless of the category the quiz is in.  

I can indeed edit the calculation for manually created grade items;  but if I make all the quizzes manually-created items, I'll have to enter each students' grade into the gradebook manually as well, which sounds almost as bad as creating a complicated formula and updating it.

Screenshot of gradebook, showing that only "Edit Settings" is available on automatically created grade items.
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In reply to Michael Seifert

Re: Rescaling quiz grades discretely

by Dominique Bauer -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
Hello Michael,

Sorry I can't see any other way, but someone else might know of one.
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