Moodle - Course-Level Assessment Configuration
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Moodle has a top-down management structure, where many settings are controlled at the site level, with only a subset of options delegated down to the course-level.
All defaults for settings in newly-created courses can be set at the site level, and permissions for changing those settings can be disabled by site administrators. In addition, administrators get the following settings at the site-level:
Graded roles - Which roles to include in the grade book (by default, only Students)
User Reporting - Site administrators can define custom reports to be made available to staff on courses
Inclusion of scales in aggregate grading - If this is checked (and it is by default) then all custom scales will have a corresponding value that is assigned based on the number of options in the scale (i.e. three values will have values of 1,2,3) and this will be included in the grade aggregation.
This is effectively a way to enable learners to be graded for things like discussion forum contributions and custom grading inputs in Moodle.
Grade Publishing - Allows roles with the grade publishing permission to publish gradebooks via URL without logging in. This has massive security implications, and I’m honestly unsure why this feature exists, even having read the documentation. I suspect a clumsy workaround to a lack of export functionality.
Grade Recovery - When a learner unenrolls and re-enrolls, they will lose their previous grades unless this option is enabled.
Unlimited Grades - Allows staff to manually enter grades into the gradebook over 100%
Grade point maximum/default - Sets the default and maximum grades permitted when creating an activity across the site.
Course end dates do not appear to have an innate effect on grading, unlike Open edX, as every graded activity has its own explicit due dates. This means that if close dates are not set on a quiz or a completion state is not set on the course, a learner can continue to complete the quiz after a course ends. This apparently also means that courses with relative end dates can’t have quizzes that end at different times, as the relative end date feature is not implemented within quizzes and a number of other activity types due to still being an experimental feature. Most experimental features appear incomplete.
Course completion is something else that can be configured at both the site- and course-level. Activity completion is independent of grading, and relies on activities reporting their completion status to the platform. Course completion is another optional feature that can be enabled for courses, and can either be marked by a member of staff for a learner manually, or automatically granted based on a series of preset conditions such as a date, a passing grade, or self-completion, allowing learners to mark the course complete themselves. This allows course completion to be used for prerequisite courses, as well as awarding badges based on either form of completion.
Grading within courses is tied specifically to graded activities, such as assignments and quizzes. This means that the majority of configuration for assessments happens at the assessment level, with the resulting grading setup effectively cascading upwards. You don’t tell Moodle that there will be 3 quizzes worth 100% of the grade, you make 3 quiz assignments and assign them points. By the simple virtue of being the only created graded content present in the course, they are worth 100% of the grade.
These activities can, however, be assigned to grade categories, which function similarly to Open edX’s assignment types in that they can have weighting, drop lowest graded content, and other related options around how to treat types of assignment that are grouped together. So this effectively overrides the raw weights assigned to the quizzes themselves. Notably in comparison to Open edX assignment types, grade categories are not required, and they can have child categories for nesting categories together (for example you could have categories for “Comprehension Quizzes” and “Mastery Quizzes” which are child categories of “Quizzes”). These categories appear in the grader report, which is also where a lot of grading display options can be found, and grades can be manually overridden:
Grading categories have their own settings which allow staff to set up how those grades display. Options include dropping the lowest grades within the category, setting a different grading scale for a specific category, and limiting the grades that can be earned within a grading category, ensuring that a learner cannot earn more than the point maximum.
Another form of grade categorization in Moodle is Outcomes. Outcomes are categories designed specifically for tracking progress and performance in different types of graded content rather than grade aggregation. In addition to this, Moodle also has the concept of Learning Plans and Competencies which allow the tracking of individual learners through competency-based education models. These are optionally enabled.
My initial impression of these features and others like them is that they were built in a very minimal way in order to answer non-universal educational needs requested by different subsets of educators. Moodle is generally fairly un-opinionated towards any particular education model, but has numerous rabbit warrens of features and functionality that were built and adopted into the core platform in order to support various models of education to a generally low standard, which has led to significant user experience issues such as bloated dropdowns and laundry lists of possible configuration options.
Overall grades can be assigned to letters, with the default applying standard A+ to F letter grades to courses. This can be manually overridden, however, allowing for a simple pass/fail setup, or any other grading configuration. As with most options, this default can be set at the site level, but it can be configured for each individual assignment and grading category. The creation of custom grading scales is a permission that must be delegated by an administrator.
Overall, Moodle’s capabilities are broad but unfocused, and extremely hierarchical and old-fashioned. Course staff have access to the grading configuration tools permitted to them by their administrators, and the extent they can modify them is tightly controlled. This in theory might help keep the user experience from degrading due to not having access to all tools, and ensures a uniform experience across courses, but I have my doubts whether this actually works, and it still doesn’t stop the administrative and course staff experience from being far more complex than it needs to be.
Links:
How to SETUP GRADEBOOK - Moodle 4.0
This video contains a wealth of information and demonstration of grading and assignment setup in vanilla Moodle 4.0, so is worth reviewing, but worth noting that the most recent version at the time of writing is 4.2 which includes a number of gradebook improvements.