By Adam Azman, Department of Chemistry
There is one last upgrade I want to tell you about for the improved gradebook: Natural Weighting of Grades!
Just set it and forget it. Unless you really enjoy digging into the weighting percentages and setting your own customized weighting system, why bother?! As you add new grade items and grade categories to your gradebook from the Setup page, Moodle 2.8’s new Natural Weighting automatically adjusts to fit the course total. If you do decide to change the weight of one grade item or grade category, Moodle will automatically readjust the weights of the other categories to equal 100% of the course total.
The whole gradebook setup page is cleaner and easier to read. Fewer columns means less confusion. I think the original Moodle programmers wanted to account for every possible method of grade aggregation. This perhaps led to more settings than would ever be used by the typical case user. Moodle 2.8 seems to recognize this and set the defaults for typical users to be clear and finally easy to understand. Thank you, Moodle.
You can change the aggregation method by editing the category settings in the Setup page if you enjoyed Mean of Grades or Lowest, Highest, or Mode of grades in the past. But I suspect most users will enjoy the Natural weighting and not need anything else.
A word of warning: right now, labeling a grade item as Extra Credit is not intuitive. You need to create the grade item, then go back into Edit Settings and check the box for Extra Credit. I’ve let the Moodle team know, and hopefully this will be easier by the time Moodle 2.8 officially rolls out.
Single View, Grade History, Grader Report, Natural Weighting. The gradebook was by far the least appealing section of the transition to Moodle a few years ago. Hopefully I’ve shown you how improved the new version has become. If you gave up on the gradebook in the past because you found it frustrating and confusing, I challenge you to give it a try and enjoy the improvements.
Blogger, Adam Azman, is a lecturer on Organic Chemistry in the Chemistry Department at Butler University.