Using Moodle, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. Grades and Scales

Grades are a necessary evil in modern education. They take a complex task—learning a new subject—and reduce it to a single measure. Grades can function as both carrot and stick for motivating students, and they are the primary measure of success in a course. Tracking and calculating grades are serious and tedious tasks. Fortunately, Moodle has a great tool to help.

The Moodle grades area is a sophisticated tool for tracking student scores in your course. You can use it for scored activities both in the classroom and in Moodle. Moodle 1.8 introduces a number of useful improvements, including options to assign extra credit, grade on a curve, and exclude a particular score from a student’s total grade.

With the new improvements, you should consider using the Moodle gradebook as your primary tool for recording scores and calculating grades. Students will appreciate being able to check their grades at any time and to compare themselves to the class average.

Grades aren’t the only way to give feedback to students. With Moodle’s scales, you can create lists of nonnumeric feedback options for assessing student work. Moodle comes with one scale by default, “Separate and Connected ways of knowing,” which we’ll discuss later in this chapter. You can easily create your own additional scales for feedback options that are meaningful to you and your students.

Using Grades

This section covers the following MTC skills: 7.4 Grades

You can access the grades area by clicking ...