NMT Moodle 1.9 Instructor's Guide |  |
NMT Moodle 1.9 Instructor's Guide | |
Moodle's gradebook facility is a good way to simplify the process of computing grades and reporting them to students. Each student can see only their own grades, and only those grades you want them to see. The gradebook is sort of a specialized spreadsheet.
The gradebook mechanism is quite flexible. The computation of the current course average for each student depends on a system of categories.
Every individual graded item in your course must be assigned to a category. By default they are assigned to the Uncategorised button (spelled that way because Moodle's inventor, Martin Dougiamas, is from Perth, Australia).
You will typically set up a formula that computes the overall numeric course grade as a function of the averages in each category.
For example, suppose you have a system that weights homework assignments as 70% of the grade and exams as 30%. Suppose a student has an 80% homework average and a 70% exam average. The course grade would then be (80×0.7) + (70×0.3) or 77.
This formula mechanism is far more powerful than this example demonstrates. You may be comforted to know that your grade formula can use log (common or natural), exponential, and both regular and hyperbolic trig functions, should you so desire.
In your role as teacher, you can bring up the gradebook by clicking on the link on the left side under (you may have to scroll down, it's one of the last links over there).
You are now on the Grader report page. In the main table, there is a row for each student, and columns for their names, individual grades, and course total.
The pull-down menu at the top left has a number of choices.
View → takes you to the grader report page. See Section 12.1, “Viewing the gradebook”.
View → displays the grades in the form that students will see them. On the right is a pull-down menu labeled Select all or one user: use this select grades for a specific students or for all students in your course.
For the Categories and items group, see Section 12.3, “Setting up gradebook categories”.
For the Letters group, see Section 12.6, “Setting up a letter grade scale”.
For the Settings group, see Section 12.2, “Configuring the gradebook”.
We recommend that you start by setting up your grade categories (Section 12.3, “Setting up gradebook categories”). Then, every time you complete the grading for some item, you will move that item to its final category so that the current overall course average includes it.
In the main grades table, there is a row for each student, and a summary row at the bottom.
The first column shows student names. You can sort the rows of this table by first or last name by clicking on the words and in the heading. Click the word a second time to change from ascending to descending order.
Each of the remaining columns in the table displays grades for some activity that is graded, such as an assignment or quiz. The last column shows the course average.
If you need to revise an assignment grade, click on the activity name at the top of the column, which will take you to the assignment page; see Section 11.2, “Grading an assignment”.