Moodle® For Dummies®

Creating Moodle Scales

Scales are a different way instructors can evaluate learners' performance instead of using traditional letter or percentage grades. For example, you may not want to give a numeric grade for contributions in a forum discussion or for adding comments to wikis, but you do want to evaluate the contribution in a qualitative way. Often, qualitative evaluations are more meaningful for learners and better for the learning goal you're trying to support. The Moodle developers have thought of this and created a scales tool that allows you to build your own scales. Moodle also includes a scale you can use if you don't want to create your own. The scales can be completely nonnumeric, or without values attached, or you can attach values. For example, you can create a scale for forum discussions.

Before you create the scale, think about the wording and how you want to explain it to your learners. The learners will be able to see the text associated with the scale when you evaluate their activity. If learners are unfamiliar with the meaning of the scales, they will be confused, and the evaluation exercise is counter-productive. Worse, yet, you will be inundated with messages, postings, and e-mails asking you to explain it.

Follow these steps:

1. Click the Grades link in the Administration block on your course front page.

   Moodle takes you the Grader Report page.

2. Click the Scales tab, or if your Grader Report is set up with a Scales drop-down list instead of tabs, choose View. ...