Allowing a student to see their grades

My customer forwarded me an email today that said "student janny cannot see her grades".  I get to play investigator and figure out what he is talking about.

First thought, is there a course by course setting that controls if the students see the grades  - yes!

Second thought, is this setting turned to no or off for the course - yes!

I found the course in question, checked the course settings and found Show gradebook to students = no

My next thought was are other courses also set to not show grades to students?

I checked a couple other courses and they were all set to allow students to see their grades.

My next thought was what is the site wide setting for this - that is populating each new course.

I went to Site Admin | Courses | Course default settings.

I saw that the default was set to allow students to see their grades


Then I noticed the moodlecourse|showgrades label.  I wondered if that was showing the table name and column name in the DB where the value was stored.  Yes!  So obvious in hindsight.

To check my thinking, I opened up my favorite DB query tool MYSQL Workbench and opened the DB and table and checked the course values and they were all set to 1, being feed by the site defaults I just mentioned.  I did a quick update of one of the courses, changing the value of one of the records in the course table to showgrades = 0, then checked the course to verify that my thinking was correct.

Finally, I emailed my customer and told him how to instruct the teachers to manage this setting themselves via the moodle course settings interface.  Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime, fish for a man he eats for a day.