The how-to guide below covers the basics of setting up your Moodle gradebook. See Moodle.org for complete gradebook documentation.
The Moodle Gradebook is a convenient tool for faculty to record and calculate student grades over the course of the semester. Students enjoy being able to track their progress in Moodle. Please note that the Moodle gradebook does not send grade information to Workday, and faculty will still need to enter official grades into Workday separately.
Need more help, or have a more complex scenario? ATS staff are happy to meet for individual consultations, just email askIT@amherst.edu to get in touch.
Grading Strategy ♦ Gradebook Setup Screen ♦ Set Overall Aggregation Method ♦ Create Categories ♦ Add or Move Grade Items ♦ Set Weights ♦ Add Grades ♦ Student View of Grades
What’s Your Grading Strategy?
Let’s start with an example syllabus. This course has various types of assignments and activities that count differently toward the final grade.
- Projects (2): 20% of final grade
- Quizzes (4): 10% of final grade
- Response Papers (2): 25% of final grade
- Participation: 20% of final grade
- Final Exam: 25% of final grade
Here’s how items on a syllabus translate into the Moodle gradebook:
- Each group of items, (e.g. projects, quizzes & response papers) is called a “Category”.
- Each individual assignment or activity is called a “Grade Item”.
- The percentage toward the final grade is called the “Weight”.
Gradebook Setup
To get started, click the Grades link under the title of your course, and then select Gradebook setup from the menu.
If our Moodle site contains activities, we will see these here already.
Set Your Overall Aggregation Method
Click edit in the course level category, which sets the aggregation method for the whole grade book.
Here are the two most common options:
Weighted Mean
- Calculates the average of all categories or top-level items, taking weights into account.
- This is a good method to use if you want to add items on the fly during the semester, or if you generally want to give a grade as a percentage of 100.
- This method tends to be the most user-friendly.
Natural
- Simply adds up the point value of all the items in your course. That number becomes the maximum grade for the class, whether it is 100 or 385.
- You can still weight items or categories.
- This is a good method if you have a pre-planned point system for your class.
Create Your Categories
For our example course, we would create three categories: Projects, Quizzes and Response Papers.
Click add category toward the top of the screen.
Enter a name, and pick an aggregation method. Within a category, it’s likely you simply want an average of all the items in the category. In this case, select Mean of Grades.
If you click “Show more...” you will have some additional options. The exclude empty grades option is important to note because this is the default for the whole gradebook- if a student has not received a grade in Moodle for an item, it will not count toward their final grade.
This is also where you can set a category to drop the lowest grade.
Click save changes at the bottom when you are done!
Add or Move Your Grade Items
Moving Existing Items Into a Category
If your grade items already exist in in Moodle, which is the case in our “Quizzes” and “Response Papers” category, simply check off the items, and then at the bottom of the screen move them into the appropriate category.
Add a New Grade Item
If your grade item does not exist in Moodle (which is the case for our Projects, Participation, and Final Exam items), you will need to create the item in Moodle. This will provide a place for you to manually record student grades for that item.
Click add grade item at the top of the screen
The main things to fill in are the name and the max grade value.
At the bottom, set the appropriate category.
Set Your Weights
With your overall aggregation method set to Weighted Mean or Natural, you can enter your desired weights in the weights column. Click save at the bottom when you're done.
Add Grades
To enter or view the actual grades, click Grades on the main course page, or select Grader report from the menu if you are already in the gradebook. For moodle activities like quizzes or assignments, the grade will automatically come in from the moodle activity.
To start adding grades for manually added grade items, toggle on Edit mode at top right.
Type in the grades. Remember to click save at the bottom when you’re done!
What Students See
To see what your students will see when they view their grades, click the dropdown menu toward the top of the screen (it probably says "Grader Report) and select User Report.
You can select a student from the "Select a user" menu to see their view. Remember, since the gradebook is set to exclude empty grades, this will show them a running total of how they are doing so far.
To adjust which columns appear in the student view, click the dropdown menu toward the top of the screen and select Course grade settings.
Need more help, or have a more complex scenario? ATS staff are happy to meet for individual consultations, just email askIT@amherst.edu to get in touch.