The Moodle grade book is a useful tool that allows you to share grades with students. The power this data holds enables you and the student to follow her progress and offer intervention or additional learning resources that will lead to her success. The instructions in this quick bite are designed for courses that use a weighted system of grading. If you need further assistance, be sure to register for a Moodle gradebook workshop or contact ITDS for a consultation.
Set up a gradebook with weighted categories:
- Go to the gradebook by clicking on “Grades” in the “Administration” block.
- Once in the gradebook, selec the “Categories and Items” tab.
- In the “Simple view,” you will see any Moodle activities (forums, quizzes, etc.) that you created. These activities are automatically added as grade items to your gradebook.
- At the top of the “Simple view,” you will see a blue folder with the name of your course. To the right of the folder is a pull-down menu where you can select your aggregation, or how the grades will be calculated. Choose “Weighted mean of grades.” This aggregation allows you to create weighted categories
Add categories to the gradebook:
- Determine what the main categories will be in your course, for example, a) participation, b) homework, c) quizzes, d) papers, and e) final exam. These categories should reflect what you have discussed with students or published in your syllabus.
- Scroll to the bottom of the “Simple View” page and click on the “Add categories” button.
- Fill in these settings:
Name: Participation (or the category name of your choice)
Aggregation: Simple weighted means of grades - Other settings: Leave the remaining settings as they are and click the “Save changes” button.
- You will see the name of your new category appear indented and beside a blue folder. To the right of the folder is the pull-down menu with the aggregation (Simple weighted means of grades). The next blank to the right is where you can specify the weight for the category. Fill in 10 or 20 or whatever weight is appropriate.
- Click the “Save changes” button at the bottom of the page.
- Repeat for each of the other categories
Add and move grade items in the gradebook:
- Note that Moodle automatically creates a grade item for any of its graded activities, such as quizzes, assignments, or forums. These grade items can be easily identified because they are in blue hyper linked print. If you already have some automatically created grade items in your gradebook, you can begin by moving them to the correct category Click in the check box or boxes to the far right of the activities, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and choose the appropriate category in the pull-down menu next to “Move selected items to…”
- To create new grade items, click the “Add grade item” button.
- Fill in these settings:
Item name: Final exam
Maximum grade: Fill in the total number of points
Minimum grade: 0
Grade category: Select the appropriate grade category from the pull-down menu, in this case, “Final exam.”
Other settings; Leave the same. - Save changes and repeat as needed.
- When you are finished, check to make sure that every category has at least one grade item. For example, if you have a category called “Final Exam,” then this category should contain at least one grade item called “Final Exam.”