Ray Morris

That's true, Tim.  Providing three options regarding completion retroactivity for every possible action doesn't seem plausible.  It seems to me we need a default policy one way or the other.

Of the two choices we have for a default policy, not being retroactive could be called "sometimes inconvenient", in case that's what a teacher was expecting.

On the other hand, making it retroactive seems severely broken in many cases.  For just one example from my personal experience, making it retroactive could send me to jail for a year. Working as a PI without passing the required classes and staying up with continuing education is a crime.  If I took the class and later the teacher changed the requirements and the system retroactively failed me, that would make me a criminal.

So we choose between "occasionally inconvenient" versus "criminally liable".

Your opinion is needed on a question of policy, of how Moodle should work in general.

Suppose there is an activity in a course, such as a quiz. The "grade to pass" for that activity is set to 70%.

The activity completion settings are set to say the student must pass the activity in order for it to be considered complete.

A student completes the activity with a 78%.  That's a passing score, so they are marked as passed and they continue through the course.

Some time later, the teacher changes the setting to say the new "grade to pass" is 80%.

The question is, had the student completed the activity, or should the new requirements be retroactive, affecting students who already completed?

If I were the student and I completed a course, maybe got a certificate or whatever and moved on with life, I'd be rather upset if the school later decided that I never completed it because they changed their grading policy retroactively.

That's doubly true for courses required for licensing and such by the government. I can't imagine if I take the course, completing it successfully, then when the regulators double check that I met the requirements for my license, the school says no, I failed, because after I passed they changed their mind about what score qualifies as passing, so I lose my license.

Someone mentioned that it made since to them to retroactively fail students when such a change is made, so we want to get a community consensus on which of the two is preferable.

What do you think:
1. A change like that be retroactive, changing students who had already passed to become "failed".

2. Once a student has passed, they passed.  New requirements should apply only to new students attempting the activity after the change.

Note - going back and retroactively re-computing completions and changing them would be quite a bit more complicated and prone to bugs.

Thanks for letting us know it worked.  I may need to have our people start doing the same.  I thought it would work, but it's good to get confirmation.

Currently when creating a new activity or editing one, the page has this block with some common grade settings:

Grade

Grade category  

  Not categorized   

Attempts allowed

  Unlimited   1   2   3   ...  

Grading method  

  Highest grade   Average grade   First attempt   Last attempt  

It has been suggested in https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-13831 that this seciton also have "grade to pass", so you can set the passing grade for the actitity when you create it.  Currently, the grade to pass is set elsewhere, in the gradebook, and is a little hard to get to.  Would be it more convenient to set it right there on the activity page?

Please comment, and vote on the tracker issue.

I'm finishing up adding a couple of new options for quiz completion. I'd like to get the wording in the interface just right, so that other people can tell what the new items do, without being too wordy.

The first is exactly like the completion condition for SCORM, were you can have it marked complete when the user gets a certain grade (perhaps after a number of attempts).  Is there better wording than adapting what SCORM uses?:

label: Require minimum score
help text: Enabling this setting will require a user to have at least the minimum score entered to be marked complete in this quiz.

The second would let you mark it complete when they've used up all of their available attempts.  Can you help me come up with wording better than this?:

label: Attempts exhausted

long form: Student attempted the maximum number of times

help text: Mark quiz complete when the student has exhausted the maximum number of attempts


Perhaps instead use "All available attempts completed'"?