Gradebook

I was initially thinking that there would be more 'required' functions added to the module API to handle getting grades (e.g. what is the grade for this user for this activity), but I guess the event system will handle that providing the gradebook itself has all the necessary informational funtions.

Will the gradebook communicate back to the modules ever? An example would be where an external system is integrated with Moodle that communicates grade information back to a module - I know this is rare, but it does come up. So, an interface exists somewhere that a user can override a grade for an assignment. The plan is that this is handled by the manual grade lock, or should that information go back to the assignment?

Another function that I could see as valuable would be retaining a history. In the proposed solution, when a grade is changed the times it was changed and the user that changed it are recorded but the old information is lost. Is there a way we could add a few fields to maintain that marking history? I could see value in a 'version' field and a 'notes' field. The 'version' field would numerically show the grading changes and the 'notes' could offer an explanation. For automatic grading (such as quiz questions) the notes would be handled automatically ('regraded by quiz'), but for a manual override, the teacher could be forced to explain ('spoke with student and we did extra work').

mike

I'm sorry that I can't speak to the technical details of Moodle, but I do have a couple of suggestions.

1. I'm a high school teacher, with one year-long course divided between four grading periods. I've had to create four separate courses to keep the grades separate. I would really appreciate at way to separate different grading periods within one course, especially the grades.

2. Our district has an approved grade book program that allows teachers to decide whether to count blanks (no grade assigned to a student for a particular assignment) as zeros or not include them in that student's average. A similar tick box on Moodle would be useful.

3. I'd also like to be able to manually change grades for glossary assignments. I use that module in my Geography class. Because the score for that assignment is an average, rather than summative, I have to give each entry (I usually assign 10 to each student) a grade out of the total number of possible points. If a student doesn't complete all the assigned entries, the score only averages the entries submitted, and there's no way for me to penalize the student for not doing some of the assigned entries.

Martin,

I don't see much about final grade for the course and transcript. Am I missing something that's there? Or should we treat it as a "second stage" once you guys are done?

Some modules (I am thinking quiz) have quite complicated rules for who can see which grades when. For users, the most logical thing if what they see in the module, and what they can see in the gradebook, is the same. If we can't manage that, then the gradebook will have to take a cautious line, and not show things until it is certain they are safe to release. That means there will be scores you can see in the individual modules but not in the gradebook, and that would suck.

For example, at the moment in the quiz the logic is this: You can see the score if

• Either, you have the capability mod/quiz:viewreports.
• Or, it is before the quiz close date, and the "Later, while the quiz is still open, Students may review Scores" checkbox is checked on the quiz settings page.
• Or, it is after the quiz close date, and the "After the quiz is closed, Students may review Scores" checkbox is checked on the quiz settings page.

I am wondering if we can cover all the required cases by adding two columns capability and contextid to the grade_items table. These would be pushed in by the module. If they are NULL, the grades would be displayed to everyone. If not, they would only be displayed to users when has_capability($gradeitem->capability, get_context_instance_by_id($gradeitem->contextid)) returns true.

So in the quiz example above, whenever the quiz is created or edited, and on the first cron run after the close date, the following code is run in the quiz module:

• If we are before the close date
  • If the "Later, while the quiz is still open, Students may review Scores" checkbox is on, set the capability and contextid columns to null.
  • Else set it to mod/quiz:viewreports, and the contextid of the quiz.
• Else, if we are after the close date
  • If the "After the quiz is closed, Students may review Scores" checkbox is on, set the capability and contextid columns to null.
  • Else set them to mod/quiz:viewreports, and the contextid of the quiz.

Actually, I don't think that this is quite flexible enough for one of the OU's more peculiar requirements, but it does cover a lot of basses.

I think it would be nicer for teachers if, when grades where locked in the gradebook, they were prevented from editing them in the module, or at least shown a warning messages when changing grades in a module when those changes will not be propagated to the gradebook.

I think the way to do this is a core API fuction

grade_item_is_locked($itemtype, $itemmodule, $itemteminstance)

then change each module to call this function where necessary and display the warning/prevent the changes.

Probably the best option is a new capability 'moodle/course:editgradeswhenlocked'. If you don't have this capability, you are prevented from changing grades (in well written modules) when they are locked. If you do have it, then you can change the grades in the module, but are shown a warning when doing so (and the changes don't propagate to the gradebook, of course, since they are locked).

Anyway, we should decide what behaviour we expect of well-written modules and document it, so users know what to expect, and module authors know what they should be implementing.


To make all this work in a way that is easy to understand for users, I think locking/unlocking should be on a per module basis, not on a per grade_item basis. E.g. with a assignment scored against several outcomes, the whole assignment is either locked or not. You can't lock just one outcome. That's too confusing.

As with Locked grades, I think we should decide a consistent policy for what level of grading detail they should expect each module to send to the gradebook.

And I think that the appropriate level of detail is, for example for the quiz, to send each attempt score, and have the aggregation done in the gradebook (but probably in the default gradebook view, only show once score for the quiz).

That lets me rip the aggregation code and the mdl_quiz_grades table out of the quiz, and anything that simplifies the quiz is great. It also means that aggregation will be consistent between modules, which is better for users.

However, we probably do need an easy link in the editing quiz UI, to give one-click access from there to where you change the aggregation settings.

I think the nicest UI for this is that when you click the 'Clean up' button, it shows you a list of columns that should be deleted, with a checkbox next to each one (on by default, but you can turn it off if you want to keep that column still) and then another button click to really delete the marked columns.

I think we also need it the other way round. Grades from activities in the meta-course should also be shown in the child course. Imagine using a metacourse to make one quiz available to several courses.

I think it is better if export plugins to provide some user interface which just shows what would be exported, but in HTML. That would make it a lot easier for admins to check that the export is doing the right thing. However, I agree there should not be an obligation on the plugin author to do this, it should just be a guideline.

Sorry I haven't had a chance to dig through the proposed tables to see if this is covered. Let me try and make sense of it.

We typically give a score ranking the quality of a piece of work (example: good job that's level 4, poor work that's level 2).

We also need to provide a weighting for each assessment (example: Your year end project is worth four times as much as Monday's journal entry)

Is this covered? can it be done in some convenient way?

Here's a wishlist for the perfect gradebook we always wanted :

1. One comprehensive gradebook for a student, instead of one per course (i know everyone will scream).

2. Ability to email the entire gradebook to any email ID - parent / teacher / student / counsellor

3. Ability to not have particular activities of a course in the gradebook - we make SCORMs/quizzes etc for learning purposes only and dont want them to show up in the gradebook at all.

4. Student completes a course, moves to another one, unenrolling from the first one. Archive of all previous grades achieved has to be visible somewhere.

5. Gradebook shows students marks, highest in class lowest in class, average of class etc. for each activity or as selected

6. Lets say a student studies Maths in Year 1 , Year 2, Year 3. Gradebook should compare performance of student over years / courses, graphically also

7. There should be one "GradeBlock" instead of a gradebook, plugin the gradeblock as a sticky and all grades are visible whereever you are.

8. Option to create Sub Categories inside categories, allowing more flexibilty.

9. Abilty to "neat" print the gradebook in one A4 size paper

I'll stop....its 1 at night, will dream rest during the day

I'm glad to see such active discussion on this very important next step for Moodle. With the help of Martin D. and the gradebook spec as it currently stands, I've put together a mock gradebook interface that should mimic what we (at Moodle HQ) envision it will be like. Some features don't yet work (instant updates of averages when changing grades; column icons), but many do.

Please log on and play around with it. The idea is to approach the development of the gradebook from the bottom-up (we've been doing mostly top-bottom so far), from a user's point of view. Once we have a solid interface drafted up, we can start setting up unit tests that will guide us in the coding process.

I hope this is the right place to add our plans for Assessment Scale Sets to the discussion. A while ago, Martin mentioned to me that assessment scales would be redone in 1.9, but it never occurred to me that Gradebook is the place to discuss. Sorry, I never use the gradebook, only activity reports for my student assessments, so I did not watch this very interesting forum. Please let me know if our system of assessment in the Project Module will be covered in the new assessement system. Here are details described below and attached as a form image.

In project-based learning, there are often multiple self-assessments, peer-assessments and teacher assessments. One example is a research essay done in three drafts. Attached is the paper form used for it. Online we try to duplicate this system, and allow as many assessment cycles desired.

Assessment Sets: typically 5-10 assessment criteria. For example, essay introduction, essay length, essay format. The "set" has a title and could be reused and shared as a set.
Assessment Criteria: each criteria has 3-5 checkpoints/items which have descriptive and numeric properties (see attached).
Checkpoint Comments: these comments tell the student exactly what they must change to improve their grade in the next assessment cycle. I do three cycles in my English writing class. I allow even more cycles if students want to improve their grade--theoretically up to 100%.
Overall Comments: usually a short comment like "Excellent!"
Total Scores: we have three types of scoring

• self-assessment
• peer-assessment (averaged)
• teacher-assessment

Weighting: Percentages for weighting each type of score are set in the Assessment task/submodule within the Project Module.

The main problem we have is that the current Moodle assessment scales do not have...

• both descriptive and numerical scales to each criteria
• comments by criteria item
• total summary grade
• naming of sets of criteria
• systems for self and peer assessment
  
• saving and sharing of sets across course and site

Will the new system in 1.9 accommodate these needs?

Thanks! Don

Hy everybody,

I'm working on a project for assign a same grade to all users of a group,
but i don't know if this gradebook allow this functionnality ?

Thank you

Hi,

I discussed with primary school collegues. We in France have a complete table of end of cycle (3 cycles on 8 years) competencies, as a guide to build our job, from a single activity, to periodic program.

It would be appreciated
To import the competencies table in Moodle grading reference system.
to get the capacity to affect each activity we build ( as an assignement or a workshop ora lesson), a set of two to five specific competencies to be graded.

Then, when we periodically manage the children achievements, says by period (5 period in a scholar year), we would get a table of grades attained by effectively worked and graded competencies.

Thanks for your interest

I think is very difficult to cope with all the possibilities, if we think in the gradebook as a two or three steps where each step can perfom a finite set of operations.
I would like to be able to express the final grade (or final grades) with formulas as I can do with a spreadsheet.
I would like to have some operators like in a spreadsheet, maybe with the topX operator SUM(LARGE(TheRange,{1,2,3,4,5}))
And then to be able to use the names (or id's) of the activities to write a formula like with an spreadsheet.
As to do as single formula may become complicated then intermediate ones could be defined.

for example: having the activities a1, a2, a3,a4,a5 the teacher could define
Theory: a1*10%+a2*20%+a3*70%
practice: a4*50%+a5*50%
final:iff(AND(theory>=50%;practice>=50%);theory*50%+practice*50%;0)



Advantages:

• Flexibility
• Export to spreadsheet could include the formulas, changing the names of activities by columns
• Display the formula to students.

inconveniences:

• Not so easy to write a formula? (maybe now is also complicated)
• Possible syntactic errors, good error messages.
• Problems when activities are added or deleted

From Nicolas's UI mockup, it is not clear if one of our requirements is going to be met, so can I check:

We (OU) really want the columns to appear (by default) in the same order that the activities appear in the course, and we want the category of each column (which might be things like 'informal self-assessment' or 'formal continuous assessment') to appear appear in a row near the top of the table.

Is that going to be possible? what do other people want?

Wishlist from our institution (not in any order and sorry for the repeats!):

1) Ability to enter decimal points in any assignment rather than integer only dropdown boxes (this reported to gradebook)
2) Ability to have more than 100 points for a single assignment
3) Ability to upload grades from an excel spreadsheet
4) Have an option for "drop lowest" even when the grades are not all out-of-100. Since the average is calculated by summing and dividing by the total, it should drop the lowest percentage grade, not the numerically lowest.
5) We would like to add (or take away) points on the grade for an assignment or for the final grade
6) We would like a "late" checkbox that automatically decreased points for a particular submission
7) When we turn on "show percents", we only want the totals, not the percents for every single item (this may already be in the plan)
8) We need better ability to look at separate groups in the gradebook; we have quite a few multi-section courses (this also mentioned in other parts of this discussion)
9) Ability to print a paper-friendly list of missing assignments for a student or a whole class.
10) Vertical display of grades in student view
11) Gradebook V2 improvements provided by Jeff Graham (manual editing of grades, especially quiz grades, graded events)

I will end with a snippet from one of my instructors:

I want to mention, though, that after going back to WebCT for my Astronomy class this semester, I have a renewed appreciation for the Moodle Gradebook. On the whole is is much quicker, easier, and better than WebCT.

Thank you!
atw

Really excited about these developments.

I've tried to find reference to this but is anyone looking at how the scales module or grade book can have textual scales linked to numeric values or ranges? e.g.

excellent effort = 10
good effort = 7, 8 or 9
satisfactory effort = 4, 5 or 6
poor effort = 1,2 or 3
no effort = 0

Why not just have numeric scales with a range of feedback comments you ask? That may be fine too but I wonder where these things would get defined? Is there a way of defining standard comments as feedback for insertion in the comment fields from a selection via a menu? Should this be defined in a scale, in the assignment/quiz etc. etc. or in the grade book?

A diagram to show the work flow of this may help perhaps I will do one?

I ask because I was wondering how the grade book will fit into best fit assessment scenarios for things like EdExcel DiDA coursework in the UK where you want to assign several marks for various components of an eportfolio and these are related to criteria? It would be easier to award the grades via textual reminders of the grades but that these equate to numbers for totalling up scores. It would be great if the criteria referenced scales of scores were able to be overlaid a course so that they wouldn't have to be set up on each individual course around the country?

An example from the DiDA best fit guidance may be a scale that shows the following textual scale but somehow this allows for assigning a score from a range :-

Some research and some SoAP = 1, 2 or 3
Accurate, current research and good SoAP = 4 or 5
Discerning, reliable research and very sound SoAP = 6 or 7

I'm beginning to think this is really best handled via the teacher comment field. It would be good if the assigning of a score then provided some default text in the comment field for later editing.

Would this be something that one would set up within the course and so shared via course backup or could it be a "schema of grading available in the grade book? Or is this what national or exam board standards assessment meta data integration will supply?

Count me among the Wishlist-ers!

#1) It would be nice to have the ability to assign a code name to a graded activity - like we do in our manual gradebooks.

At present, the title we give assignments for our students to see is the same that is listed in the gradebook. This can make for some very long titles - and a very long scroll. Also, the grade alignment gets off, creating visual confusion.

Maybe create a few extra fields under each quiz setup, etc.:

Quiz Title:
Title abbrev/short name/code12-15 char. max?)
Gradebook options:
Use quiz short name in gradebook: (checkbox)


#2) (For me this is a BIGGY!!)
Is it possible to assign more than one grading scale to an assignment?

Elem teachers rely heavily on rubrics and sometimes external motivators, such as point reward systems.

For certain activities, points are given. Homework earns a regular homework credit, but then also, a reward point. Tests earn the regular correct/incorrect grade, as well as, reward points based upon their score. The higher the score, the more points. These points are then "cashed in" periodically for privileges or prizes (such as homework-free pass, extra free time, or (real special) small reading books, fancy notebooks, pencils, trinkets, etc. You have no idea how many tiny bouncy balls and yo-yos I've gone through! lol)

Right now, I have Scales set up for this, but I am limited on the activities I can "grade" this way because I can only apply one scale to each assignement.

Sometimes, there are assignments where I have to grade according to accuracy (regular grade) AND by a rubric (quality) plus I give Reward Points because these tend to be very difficult assignments.

That's three different Scales for one activity. I hope some of this makes it in!

Thanks for asking!

Martin,

My faculty would really like the ability to display progressive grades.  An estimation of their grade to date in the course based on work due to this point in the course.  Example: 60 points earned out of 80 possible at this point in the course.

First off, great work on the gradebook; the proposals are well thought out and address most everything that my faculty are talking about. I particularly like the locking of grades, the ability to manually modify a grade (especially from a quiz) and the addition of text notes (brilliant idea, that one!). I have read through this Forum and the Development:Grades page but there are still some things I am not clear about whether the new system will support:

1. Hold/release. Currently, whenever a student's assignment has been graded the student sees the results immediatley. But what if the faculty wants to go back and readjust the final grade? It may be too late for a change of mind if the student has already seen her grade. This may be addressed by something like:
   
   1. Have a setting in the assignment creation page : hold grades for release / release immediately
   2. On the grading page an option Release now/ Release after [date/time] / Hold all (overrides setting)
   3. Also a reminder on the grading page of the current grade release status.
2. Faculty may want to go back to a previous course to revisit how they did their grading. Here is where the notes will really come in handy. But once students are unenrolled from the course all their grades disappear. It would be great if there were some means to annonymize student names in a gradebook after the course has finished so that the grades and comments can be preserved after the original students are unenrolled.
   

I think that some graduate student in sociology should research a thesis on how Moodle has benefitted from the Open Source system of development. When developers are this open to input from the user community brilliant innovations are bound to result!

Hi

We have several courses per subject, for example, our Year 9 students are enrolled on the following Geography courses:

• Expedition Tourism
• Expedition Oceans
• Expedition World and Maps
• Expedition Earthquakes
• Expedition People Everywhere
• Expedition Coasts

Students study roughly 8 subjects, which means they end up with potentially 48 gradebooks they have to check to keep track of their progress.

Please could we suggest having a method to pull together all the gradebooks for a student so they can be viewed centrally from one location.

Thank you in advance

Daniel

Another thought occurred to me -

I'd really like to be able to track a students use of the course through the gradebook, for example, (in a secondary setting) if I set a homework of 'post at least once to the X forum and reply to at least one post', or 'post at least 100 words to X wiki', I'd like to be able to somehow have that come up in the gradebook as either done or not. similarly, I'd like to be able to see if they have accessed a certain resource, so that if I wanted them to read or print it, I can quickly see who in my class has not accessed it at all just before I start my lesson.

I know that this is already possible through the logs, but its not immediately clear who in the class is missing from the list of names and it doesn't allow many items to be seen on the same screen. I really need a way of showing the whole class in gradebook style, so I can tell at a glance who I need to check up on and perhaps keep track of whole class moodle use in a 'participation' category.

Would it be possible to build a simple interface to allow a query of the log tables to be entered as a gradebook item? Something like activity/resource + deadline + action required?

Matt

Hi,

I currently try to develop some user adaption features in a plugin designed for new moodle 1.9 which will use the new gradebook API and database schema (I know it still is under construction ).

For moodle the new 1.9 version gradebook seems to be an excellent data source for doing user adaption on a high level, so I currently try to develop a plugin using data stored in the gradebook. So on the high level I don't need to worry about the internal structure in the activity modules.
I studied your spezification, but I do not understand in which time interval the grade data from the modules is written.

Will there be really ALWAYS the current grade data in the gradebook?

I think about some legacy modules like SCORM activities (in the current implementation) for example or some third-party modules which store the user progress in their internal database while proceeding through the different SCORM content objects. This data can currently be accessed by the scorm_grades() function in the "good old" 1.8 way.

When will this function be called by the legacy framework of the new 1.9 gradebook? Will it be alwas called when necessary so the data is up-to-date? How does the gradebook system know when it has to update its data?

Is there a way for an end user to manually add credits they have earned elsewhere ? I would like for the user to be able to add credits with an ajax type interface where they enter the description of the course and the credits earned elsewhere.

While not necessarily directly related to the gradebook proper, I would like to see summary information on the user profile view grade page. I think it will make use of the functions in the new gradebook functions. See (and vote) MDL-6976 for more details.

Please, I beg of you to fix the statistics generation, and to help me help my faculty deal with the "dashes are zeroes, or are they?" conundrum that has plagued every version of moodle since we started using it (v 1.5.x).

Please give us the option of removing "-" grades from the population completely for the purpose of statistics generation.

Report Card

Transcript

Ability to see grade from each class the student is a member of so they don't have to go to each class.  This is the same, I think, as the Report Card and Transcript.

Thank you for any consideration.

Hi, Martin,

I am getting into this discussion a little late, but here goes.

It appears to me that there are different views for the Grade Book. One for teachers who want to see all the students and all their grades in that one class. Another view is for a student who wants to see only his or her grades from all the courses. In addition to the two views already planned, I think it is useful to create a view for administrators who may wish to list all the students and all the courses, sorted either by courses, or by students.

Finally, there is the need for creating transcripts for individual students, which can be a special case of the student view of the grade book.

Teachers may wish to have the flexibility of adding new columns (i.e. assignments, quizzes, or activities) to the grade book. I did not see this functionality in the docs page. Perhaps it is part of the AJAX functionality.

In addition, teachers may also need to be able to add or remove students from the grade book, and handle exceptions, i.e. manually adjusting or overriding any particular student's grades. Again, this may be already part of the AJAX plan.

I think it is overall very exciting to have the Event API and the Core API because this will open up Moodle to all the flexibility that you envision.

Thanks,

Andrew

I've been trawling the forums looking at how I can determine if a learner has completed a course in Moodle. I am using topic format mainly and really need some way of implementing a check that the course has been completed (probably by checking that all quizzes in the course have been taken and a grade posted for each).

From what I can see this functionality may be included in 1.9. Is this the case? Is it worth moving to 1.9 to have this functionality (we are just piloting 1.8 at the moment)?

Many thanks.

OK, I just loaded the 1.9 dev on my local dev server and found that it's still not working yet (after I loaded with a lot of grades, it still showing nogradereports, I haven't tried to bypass this to get to see the current actual GUI, but just want to point out (after I took a look the the current GUI mock-up):

1. Please consider the user case that an instructor might have 1000+ students in one course. Would the "Grade locking," "Grade visibility" features features still "usable" for such large classes? This is the case here at SFSU and we had to do some local customization (including adopting gradebook plus v2 and modified it a little bit) to make gradebook really "usable" for our teachers. The really great thing about GBPv2 is that you could use your "tab" key to manually enter grades, which is really great! Would this be possible for the upcoming new gradebook that would be included in moodle 1.9?

2. Export/Import feature is GREAT! By the way it would be great to have import/export available in both Gradebook and "assignment" level (this is particular useful for teachers who teach large classes!)

3. The current GUI (based on the mock-up) seems to be a little bit confusing, could we invite some end-users (teachers/students) and have them look at it, to see if they could understand how to use the new gradebook without much re-training? User-friendly (and course-centered, for university-setting) has been the strength of moodle, let's don't lose this strength...

Just my 2c.

Hi,

I just went for a visit to the new gradebook again and I maybe found another problem: Is it possible to read the gradebook data with an automated tool?

In detail: Users usually know where to find the desired grade when they search for it by hand. In my opinion it is not possible for an automated tool to search for a certain grade because it does not know what a single grade means. There are currently lots of different grades in the gradebook: Manually entered grades for an activity, calculated ones, too, grades for category aggregation, final grades for a course, ...
So for exmaple I want to know if a student was successful in an activity X, or not (by simplifying this problem into these 2 values good -- bad). How can I determine this with the gradebook? Which grade item is the right one to tell me this? Sorry, but my tool in fiction will not understand the "outcomes" and what they mean. There must be another solution for accessing grades without using semantic interpretation...

So it would be nice if anyone could tell me a solution for this problem. Maybe we need to store some additional data for the gradebook (?) But I am sure that automated grade data tracking will be a nice feature not to forget, even for future purposes.

Yours, Gert

Hi.  Just a note of input.  I use Moodle for providing Continuing Education.  As part of that I have to export grades and various info for all courses and users and upload to an automated system.  The entry into the database is triggered when the participant passes a quiz and generates a certificate.  This way  I only receive export information of people who have passed courses.  The information is gathered from the person's profile page, the course settings page and the certificate module.  In retrospect, I would have all of the information that comes from teh settings page be integrated into the certificate module for simplicity.  Anyhow, Ballistic Learning designed this gradebook for me that exports all information into an Excel spreadsheet and includes all relevant information for CEBroker uploads.

I have been using it for a while.  The version they developed was on Moodle 1.6.  Not being a developer, I am not sure how easy it would be to modify for 1.8/1.9.  Nevertheless, I have found that particular plug-in to be imperative and would love to see it available to other users as an optional module.

If you would like to look at it, you can email me at dr.snipes@allceus.com

Hi

We are a corporate environment - not a university. Our needs are very basic and yet we are struggling with meaningful grade scores iro number of points = a percentage and then keeping track of each staff(student's) progress in a gradebook/database. We need to report by Group company (category) then by department (sub-category)

We use Articulate presenter & quizmaker and we get a 1 or 0 for pass or fail BUT only the student can see the latest % score. We are testing with Moodle 1.8

How do you set the grade marking periods in Moodle 1.9.6 ? I have only editing teacher privileges and need to set marking periods such as m1, m2. etc.... Can anyone help me?