Setting up your Moodle gradebook

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This guide will demonstrate how to setup a Moodle gradebook from your rubric:

Part 1: Creating categories

The first step in creating a gradebook is setting up the categories. In the mock rubric, Participation, Assignments, Midterm, and Final Exam will be our categories. 

1. Log into Moodle using your StFX username and password

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2. Identify the Course you would like to look at.

The first page that opens after log in is the "My Courses". This is a list of all the courses you are enrolled in as an instructor or as a student

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3. If you are a professor, turn editing on by clicking on the gear at the top right of the page and click "Gradebook setup".

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4. Here, you will see that the 3 assignments that I uploaded to my course are present. For now, we will ignore these assignments. 

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5. Click the "Add Category" button.

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6. Click "Show more" under "Grade category" and "Category total"

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7. Under "Grade category" enter the category name. For the purposes of this example, I will call this category "Assignments". 

Aggregation type: Weighted mean of grades (weighted average)

The aggregation determines how grades in a category are combined, such as

• Mean of grades - The sum of all grades divided by the total number of grades (all grade items are equal)
• Median of grades - The middle grade when grades are arranged in order of size
• Lowest grade
• Highest grade
• Mode of grades - The grade that occurs the most frequently
• Natural - The sum of all grade values scaled by weight

If you would like the grade items in a category to all be worth the same value, change the aggregation type to "Simple weighted mean of grades". Ex: Students submit 10 journals, each worth 10%. 

Leave "exclude empty grades" checked. This will allow students to check their running total. 

"Drop the lowest": you can choose to ignore the student's lowest mark. I will leave this 0 for this example. 

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8. Under "Category total" make sure that you click "show more". 

Category total name is optional. If left blank, it will take the name of the category. 

Under "Maximum grade" enter the total mark out of  100%. For this example, our Assignment category is worth 50%. 

Click "Save changes"

9. Repeat steps 6 to 9 and add the necessary categories. Participation is set to 10%, Midterm to 10%, and the Final exam to 30%. See below: 

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Part 2: Adding grade items to categories

Now that categories have been made, we can place grade items into those categories. All categories must have at least ONE grade item in them. 

1. Now it is time to add the assignments that were made prior to gradebook setup into their respective categories. As you can see below, I made 3 assignments for my class but they are not in a category. I would also like to reset their weight.

 

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2. To place the grade items into a category, check off the boxes under "Select". And at the bottom of the page under "Move selected items to" choose "Assignment". 

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OPTIONAL 3. If you would like to change what the grade items (in this case assignments) are out of, go back to the assignment on the course page, click edit settings, and under grade, you can change it. For more detailed instructions, click here.  For the purposes of this example, Assignment 1 are 2 are marked out 75, and Assignment 3 is out of 30 marks: 

Assignment 1 - Movie Review (Marked out of 75) worth 35% of Assignment Category mark

Assignment 2 - Book Review (Marked out of 75) worth 35% of Assignment Category mark

Assignment 3 - Critique (Marked out of 30) worth 30% of Assignment Category mark

a) In this example, I would like to have each assignment be worth a different percentage of the total assignment grade. Assignment 1 and 2 are worth 35% each of the Assignment category and Assignment 3 is worth 30%. 

i) To adjust this, make sure that the Assignment category has the aggregation type set to weighted mean of grades (Part 1, Step 8). A weight category will appear (with a default of 1.0) reset these to 35, 35, 30, respectively. If all assignments are worth the same thing, then you can make the aggregation type "simple weighted mean of grades". 

Save changes. 

b) In the dropdown menu of Gradebook setup, change to single view. 

i). Select the specific user (for this example I used fake student "Work shop 4"). One can see that on Assignment 1, the student got 75/75, Assignment 2 50/75, and Assignment 3 15/30. Therefore out of 50%, the student earned 36.67%. Their running total in the course is 73.33 % (36.67 x 2 (Remember that the Assignment category is worth 50% of the final mark)).

ii) Always ensure that your calculations are correct: 

Assignment 1: 75/75 = 1.0

1.0 x 35 = 35%

Assignment 2: 50/75 = 0.67

0.67 x 35 = 23.34%

Assignment 3: 15/30 = 0.5

0.5 x 30 = 15% 

35 + 23.34 + 15 = 73.33% (student's running total in the course). 

NOTE: Hiding items does not always remove the grade from the grade calculation.  Deleting the hidden item fixes the grade calculation discrepancy. Always double check your gradebook calculation and ensure that it is correct. 

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4. Repeat steps 1 and 2 but add the grade items to Participation.

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5. Because each participation mark is worth the same, the Category aggregation can be changed to "Mean of grades" (See Part 1, step 8). If you forget to do this, you can leave the weighted mean of grades because the default weights are all set to 1.0. 

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6. Repeat adding grade idems to the rest of the categories. 

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7. Save.