Moodle Assessments: Grade Book

Moodle Assessments: Grade Book Instructor: Scott Watkins E-mail: learntech@ncsu.edu DELTA website: delta.ncsu.edu Phone: (919) 513-7094 New! Expanded LearnTech Help Desk hours: Sunday: 11am 5pm Monday through Thursday: 8am 8pm Friday: 8am 5pm Overview The Moodle grade book is a very flexible and powerful tool that can help instructors monitor their students performance and provide timely feedback. The grade book is, however, a complex tool, and it can be initially confusing before getting some familiarity with how the tool works. This workshop provides an introduction to the Moodle grade book, and is designed to help instructors get started using this useful component of Moodle. Objectives After completing this workshop, participants will be able to: Locate and navigate the Moodle grade book Configure and customize the grade book display Create grade items and grade categories Calculate course grades using a variety of grading methods Share grades and feedback with students Submit final course grades directly to Registration and Records through WolfWare Table of Contents Grade Book Basics... 2 Navigating the Grade Book... 3 View à Grader Report... 5 Categories and Items à Simple View... 6 Aggregation... 7 Submitting final grades through WolfWare... 9 Additional Resources... 10 Last modified: July 1, 2014

Grade Book Basics Using the Moodle grade book can be a challenge at first, but it becomes easier to understand once you get accustomed to using it. Here are some quick tips/reminders to get started. 1. To view the Grade Book, click Grades, which is located in the Administration block under Course administration. 2. The Grade Book is organized with various features on several screens. To navigate between the various screens of the Grade Book, use the tabs across the top, or use the dropdown menu located in the upper left, or use the Administration block, whichever you prefer. 3. Two of the most commonly used screens: a. Select View à Grader report to list students down the left side of the screen and display columns for grade items and totals. This view is the instructor s default view of the Grade Book. b. Select Categories and items à Simple view to display all grade items in the course, organize or modify them, or create new grade items or categories. This view is of grade items and grade book structure; it does not show any student grades. 4. Creating an Activity in Moodle (such as an Assignment or Quiz) automatically creates a grade book item (and a column in the Grader Report) for that Activity. Grade items can also be created manually. 5. When you assign a grade to a student within an Assignment, the grade is automatically recorded in the Grade Book. Quizzes can be automatically graded and entered in the Grade Book, with the exception of Essay questions, which Moodle does not automatically grade. 6. At the end of the semester, the Submit Grades tool in WolfWare can automatically pull final grades from the Moodle Grade Book and submit them to Registration and Records. Need Help? 2

Navigating the Grade Book The tabs across the top of the grade book provide access to the grade book s various features. The features that you re likely to use most heavily are described first below. Most commonly used: View Grader report: student names and grades in a spreadsheet-style display; described above. View User report: grades for a single student or all students; similar to what a student sees; suitable for printing. Categories and items Simple view: create and modify grade items; described above. Settings Course: change grade book appearance and set options; affects all course members. My preferences Grader report: change grade book appearance; affects only your view and is consistent across all of your courses grade books. All Grade Book tabs: View Grader report: see Most commonly used above. Outcomes report: statistics related to any Outcomes that have been created within the course. Contact DELTA s LearnTech help desk for assistance using Outcomes. User report: see Most commonly used above. Categories and items Simple view: see Most commonly used above. Full view: similar to Simple View but includes additional features for modifying grade items and categories. In most cases Simple View is sufficient, but Full View is also available. Scales View: Grading scales (other than numeric) that are being used or are available in the course. Use caution with grading scales, as they may not function the way you think they do! Contact DELTA s LearnTech help desk for assistance. Need Help? 3

Outcomes Letters Import Export Outcomes used in course: Select Outcomes to use in the course (if you have created any). Edit outcomes: Create and edit Outcomes. Import outcomes: Import Outcomes using an external file. View: The table that your Grade Book uses to convert percentages into letter grades. Edit: Allows the instructor to override the default letter grade scale and use a different conversion of percentages to letter grades in the course s Grade Book. CSV file: Import grades to the Grade Book using a file formatted into comma-separated values. Contact the LearnTech help desk for assistance with importing Grade Book data. XML file: Import grades to the Grade Book using an XML file. Contact the LearnTech help desk for assistance with importing Grade Book data. Export Grade Book data to a variety of formats. Exporting can be used for backup purposes, or can be useful for managing grades outside of Moodle, such as in a spreadsheet application. Contact the LearnTech help desk for assistance with exporting. Available export formats are: o OpenDocument spreadsheet o Plain text file o Excel spreadsheet o XML file Settings Course: see Most commonly used above. My preferences Grader report: see Most commonly used above. Need Help? 4

View à Grader Report The Grader Report is made up of rows and columns, with students listed in rows down the left side and grade items and categories displayed as columns and arranged across the top. Using the Grader Report Grades from Moodle Activities are automatically entered, in most cases. For grade items that were created automatically by Moodle (like Assignments and Quizzes), you typically don t need to do any editing of student grades in the Grade Book (since those activities are normally graded on the activity screen itself). Whatever grade is given within the activity automatically appears in the Grade Book. Some things, like essay questions on quizzes, are not automatically graded. Grades for manually created grade items can be entered directly in the Grade Book. For manually created grade items, the Grade Book interface is the only place to enter or edit grades. Before you can do any editing in the Grade Book, you have to click the Turn editing on button located in the upper right. Enter or edit grades, and then remember to click Update to save your changes! Click the Turn editing off button when finished. Grades from Moodle Activities can be overridden. If you do edit grades directly in the Grade Book, the grade will be considered overridden and the grade entered in the Grade Book will replace any grade that might be in the activity itself. A grade override in the Grade Book is indicated by a tan shaded background. Grades can be displayed as real scores, percentages, or letters. To change the way that grades are displayed, go to Settings à Course, and then in the Grade item settings section, select a different grade display type. For example, if an assignment is worth 10 points, then a score of 9 can be displayed in any one or two of the following ways: o Real: 9 o Percentage: 90% o Letter: A- A few additional tips o o To highlight a column, click the empty space in the column or row header. This allows you to scroll to the bottom and still focus on a specific column when you can no longer see the header at the top. This works for rows too. If, instead of one long page of students, you d prefer multiple pages with fewer students per page, you can change the number of students that appear per page in My preferences à Grader report. In the General section, enter any number you like as the Students per page setting, and then click Save changes at the bottom. Need Help? 5

o Graded activities allow you to enter feedback to the student. If you want to see this feedback in the Grade Book, go to My preferences à Grader report. In the General section, set Show Quick Feedback to Yes. Now, when you turn editing on in the Grade Book, both the score and the feedback are visible. Categories and Items à Simple View The Simple View screen displays all of your grade items and categories, and does not display anything related to individual student scores. Use this screen to create, edit, and organize the items in your grade book, and define how overall scores will be calculated from multiple grade items. Using the Simple View Create a grade item. Click the Add grade item button. To use the basic default values (you can always change them later), just enter a name for the new grade item in the Item name field, and then click the Save changes button at the bottom. The new grade item will appear both on the Simple View screen and the Grader Report screen. Create a grade category. Categories are useful not only for better organization but also for calculating grades. For example, you might use a category like Exams to generate an overall Exams score that is calculated from the scores of the individual exams. This calculation might be a sum, or an average, or some other formula. To add a category, click the Add category button. Organize items and categories. Your grade items and categories can be displayed in any order you wish. The order of items in the Simple View screen also determines the order of the columns on the Grader Report. o o To move a single item, find the row for that item and then click the Move icon in the Actions column. A new window will appear that displays all of your grade items separated by dashed boxes. Click the dashed box that corresponds to the position you want the item to have (above or below some other item). For example, if you were moving Quiz 2 to place it directly below Quiz 1, then you would click the dashed box below Quiz 1. To move multiple items between categories, select the items to move by checking their boxes in the Select column. Then, select the destination category from the Move selected items to menu at the bottom. To move multiple items so that they are in no category, then select the course name from the same menu. Make grade items visible or invisible to students. You can make grade items visible to students, or conceal them entirely with the Show/Hide icon located in the Actions column. Need Help? 6

Configure grade item settings. Click the Edit icon in the Actions column to view the settings for any grade book item or category. These settings can be used to change the way that a particular grade item is displayed in the grade book. If you are unable to change a setting, it may be because that setting is configured in the activity itself rather than in the grade book. Aggregation Moodle uses the term aggregation to refer to the method used to combine a set of multiple scores into a single score. Mathematically, there are many different ways to aggregate a set of scores, and different aggregation methods may be useful in different contexts, even within the same course. In any grade category in your grade book, you can set the aggregation method to determine how the grade items within that category will be handled. For the purposes of aggregation, the course itself is also considered a category. More commonly used aggregation methods Mean of grades Graded items all have equal weight regardless of their individual number of points. How the grade is calculated: Individual scores are normalized (converted to a ratio between 0.0 and 1.0) and then added together to produce a sum. This sum is then divided by the number of graded items. This aggregation method is more often used within a grade category (e.g., to generate the average score within a set of equally weighted quiz grades) than to aggregate the entire course grade, since in most courses all assignments do not carry equal weight toward the final grade. Example: Homework 1 (10 pts.) Homework 2 (10 pts.) Midterm (25 pts.) Final (50 pts.) If student scores: 10 (or 1.0) 8 (or 0.8) 18 (or 0.72) 50 (or 1.0) Moodle calculates: (1.0 + 0.8 + 0.72 + 1.0) / 4 = 3.52 / 4 = 0.88 (or 88%) Need Help? 7

Simple weighted mean of grades The number of points that a grade item is worth determines the weight of that grade item. How the grade is calculated: Multiple grades are added together to produce a total, and this total is then divided by the number of possible points that can be earned, which results in a ratio between 0.00 (no points were earned) and 1.00 (all points were earned). This ratio is then expressed as a percentage. By default, items that are not yet graded do not contribute to the total score, so students see a grade based only on what has been marked rather than all (non-graded) items. The default can be changed to include non-graded items as zero if desired. Example: Homework 1 (10 pts.) Homework 2 (10 pts.) Midterm (25 pts.) Final (50 pts.) If student scores: 10 8 18 50 Moodle calculates: (10 + 8 + 18 + 50) / 95 = 86 / 95 = 0.9053 (or 90.53%) Sum of grades How the grade is calculated: Multiple grades are added together to produce a total. If the sum is ultimately going to be reported as a percentage, it might make more sense to use Simple weighted mean of grades instead, which not only calculates the sum of the points but also reports the score as a percentage of 100. Example: Homework 1 (10 pts.) Homework 2 (10 pts.) Midterm (25 pts.) Final (50 pts.) If student scores: 10 8 18 50 Moodle calculates: 10 + 8 + 18 + 50 = 86 Need Help? 8

Weighted mean of grades Weights are assigned to items or categories, in order to have some grade items count more than others toward the total score. How the grade is calculated: Grade items are assigned weights in the grade book. Each score from items or categories is normalized (converted to a ratio between 0.0 and 1.0) and then multiplied by its assigned weight. The resulting scores are added together to produce a sum, and then this sum is divided by the sum of all the weights to produce the final score. If the total of all weighted items is 100, then the weights are effectively percentages, but item weights are not required to total 100 (e.g., relative weights of 1 and 2 are acceptable). Example: Homework 1 (10 pts.) Homework 2 (10 pts.) Midterm (25 pts.) Final (50 pts.) Assigned weight: 1 1 2 3 If student scores: 10 (or 1.0) 8 (or 0.8) 18 (or 0.72) 50 (or 1.0) Moodle calculates: ( (1.0 * 1) + (0.8 * 1) + (0.72 * 2) + (1.0 * 3) ) / 7 = 6.24 / 7 = 0.8914 (or 89.14%) Less commonly used aggregation methods Highest grade: Reports the highest grade of a group of grades, after normalization. Lowest grade: Reports the lowest grade of a group of grades, after normalization. Median of grades: Reports the middle grade of a group of grades. If there are two middle grades, then the mean of the two middle grades is reported. Submitting final grades through WolfWare If your final course grades are recorded in Moodle, you can submit them automatically to Registration and Records through the WolfWare interface. The grade book column that will be submitted to WolfWare is the Course total column. 1. Using your Unity ID and password, log in to WolfWare at https://wolfware.ncsu.edu/. 2. Navigate to the tab where the course is displayed, and in the course block click the Manage button. 3. On the Course Management screen, click the tab on the left labeled Submit Final Grades to SIS. 4. Using the checkboxes in the Submit column, select the grades to submit. Links above the roster also allow you to select all or none. 5. When the grades to submit have been selected, click the Submit Selected Grades button at the bottom. Need Help? 9

Additional Resources http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/gradebook http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/grades_faq Notes Please evaluate this workshop at https://apps.delta.ncsu.edu/fdms/evaluation.php Need Help? 10