Moodle: Grading: LSU Overview


Grading in Moodle involves several components, best practices, and guidelines to enhance the grading process and facilitate ease of use. Included in this is the Moodle Gradebook, a robust tool for faculty to use to keep up with their students' grades.

1. Grading Best Practices

Grade within the activity—when entering grades for Moodle activities such as Quizzes or Assignments, always try to enter the grades within the activity. Each activity has its own mechanism for grading. Non-Moodle grades (conventional paper / pencil exams, etc.) can also be kept in the Moodle gradebook. To do this a Manual Grade Item will need to be created from within Gradebook Setup. Then you can manually enter grades for those items by navigating to the Gradebook and turning on editing.

NOTE:  Moodle will allow you to manually enter grades for Moodle activities in the same way that you do for manual grade items if necessary. Use this option sparingly. When you do so, you are overriding the grade calculated by Moodle. Once saved, overridden grades will be displayed with a beige colored background to remind you that the grade has been overridden.

Category weights—when using Custom Weights categories, make the sum of all category weights equal 100. By doing so, it will always be clear what percentage of the course total is derived from each category (the weight will denote the percentage). To edit category weights, refer to step 6 of Moodle Gradebook: Creating Categories.

Extra Credit—use extra credit sparingly. If a given category contains an extra credit item, adding the extra credit is the last calculation performed for that category after all other calculations. For this reason, small extra credit maximum grades might have a more significant impact on grades than intended.

Note:  Be aware that Moodle does not cap grades at 100%. If a student has a high score and also accrues enough extra credit to exceed 100% for a given grade item, the extra points will carry over, in all aggregations, all the way to the course total.

2. Blank vs Zero Grades

By default, Moodle will exclude empty grades from grade calculations rather then treating them as zeros so that grade items that are not yet complete do not lower students' averages. However, Moodle cannot distinguish between a grade item (such as a quiz) that the student has missed and one that has simply not yet been completed.  For that reason, instructors must enter zeros for students that miss a quiz or assignment or the student will not be penalized for the missing grade.  

3. Posting Grades

During Midterms and Finals, the Post Grades block will automatically appear on the Course Tools page. This feature transfers the letter grades from your Moodle gradebook to your myLSU page. You can only transfer grades once per class from Moodle to myLSU. If you need to make subsequent changes, you will have to do so from within myLSU. Also, the transfer from Moodle to myLSU is for your convenience. You still need to submit your grades from within myLSU.  For more information, please see myLSU Post Grades.

Build the Gradebook

How to add a Gradebook Category

How to add a Manual Grade Item

How to add an Extra Credit Item

How to change aggregation methods

How to exclude / include empty grades

How to enter / override grades in Gradebook

How to change grade display type

How to move items in Gradebook setup

Support & Training

The Faculty Technology Center (FTC) provides Moodle support by email, by phone, or live through Zoom. For contact information, please see the article Faculty Technology Center: LSU Overview. To connect through Zoom and for further information on support services and training, see the LSU Online & Continuing Education Faculty Resources & Support page.

The FTC also provides just-in-time faculty training opportunities and recorded training sessions. Attending at least one training session for Moodle upgrades is highly recommended. For a comprehensive list of available workshops and recordings, please see the LSU Online & Continuing Education Technology Training page.

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