Itamar Tzadok

You're welcome. The div tags should work if entered in html source mode ( button in the editor's toolbar). The appearance of the text "<div>" in the screenshot seems to indicate that the tags were not entered in html mode. But if the table works for you it's good enough for me.

You were actually quite clear already in your previous description. The suggested formula can be easily extended by defining more grading schemes and adding corresponding flags. It seems though that you only need one more flag in the course level, for the final, and so the formula in the course total may be just a little bit more complex. The homework assignments may be handled in a similar way but separately in the Homework category.

Indeed older versions have this "exclude" feature. I never used it myself. I wonder how this feature knows in what relative fashion it should redistribute the slack. If it's a fixed way then the feature may not be very useful to anyone who doesn't follow this predetermined scheme. It wouldn't be surprising if this feature was intentionally omitted from later versions precisely for this reason.

Isn't this how most teachers handle excused absences?

Perhaps, but since now we are Moodling we may as well reconsider what most teachers do. Personally I don't see much point in mid-terms, all the more so if they give rise to many exclusions. If the Final Exam is necessary for a final grade there should be no exclusions there. The Homework component can have a built-in make-up element (e.g. 10 best of 11); in addition, each homework assignment can be available online for a whole week (this way it won't be enough to be sick for a couple of hours to get an exclusion; one will have to be very sick the whole week(!) and still the first such week will already be covered by the make-up assignment). This should cover all standard exclusion cases including required accommodations for special needs. If there are outstanding issues at all they are very few and at any rate they already deserve manual handling by virtue of being outstanding.

So perhaps the exclusion problem may be effectively resolved by restructuring the assessment scheme. Just a thought.

So basically you have two grading schemes:

0.25*Homework + 0.25*Midterm + 0.5*Final

0.33*Homework + 0.66*Final

All you need is a marker which will make only one of them active.

You can add a hidden grade item, say, 'Excuse_me' and update the grade to 1 for those who are excused. Then you set the course total with the following formula:

((0.25*Homework + 0.25*Midterm + 0.5*Final)*abs(Excuse_me-1)) + ((0.33*Homework + 0.66*Final)*Excuse_me)

Sure. If you use a table to display the entries in the list view you can use scripting to traverse the table rows, and for each row calculate the value based on the raw data and add it to the designated cell.

So suppose the table id is 'itemList', the raw value is in cell 3 and the calculated value should be in cell 4. The script may look something like this:

• var myList=document.getElementById('itemList');
• var myRows=myList.firstChild.rows;
• for (var j=1;j<myRows.length;j++){
  • var myCells=myRows[j].cells;
  • var rawVal=myCells[3].innerHTML;
  • var calcVal=rawVal*25;
  • myCells[4].innerHTML=calcVal;
• }