Using Moodle

Chapter 12. 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. They can function as both carrot and stick in motivating students, and are the primary measure of success in a course. Tracking and calculating grades are serious and tedious tasks. Fortunately, Moodel has a tool to help.

The Moodle gades area is a simple tool for tracking student scores in your course. Currently, gradebook functions as an automated tool for tracking scores in Moodle activities. It doesn’t do a lot of fancy calculation, but you can download your scores to a spreadsheet or other tool for additional analysis.

Grades aren’t the only way to give feedback to students. With Moodle’s scales, you can create lists of non-numeric feedback options for assessing student work. Moodle comes with one scale by default, “Connected and Separate 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

There isn’t much to do with the current grades area. You can access the grades area by clicking the Grades link in the administration area on the left side of the main page of your course.

After you click the link, you will be taken to the Grades display, as shown in Figure 12-1. The students in the course are listed in the lefthand column. Across the top, you’ll see all of the activities you have added ...