Working out the Gradebook complexities ...

My customer loves the gradebook.  We host about 200 K-12 high school courses in NY State.  The courses are taught by certified NYS educators.  With this as the backdrop, you can understand why the gradebook gets so much attention.  Most the questions that come from our teachers and from my customer (think of him as the principal) concern the gradebook.  Adding a little more complexity into the mix are the courses that we provide.  Most of the courses come from commercial vendors who fully utilize the moodle gradable entities:

• quizzes
• assignments
• discussions

We are preparing for our 2nd semester after the Christmas holiday which means preparing new courses for deployment.  I will call those new courses B or second semester courses.  After my customer, Mr. Mike the principal, complained to the vendor about too many quizzes and assignments being buggy this fall in their courses, the vendors offered up *revised course templates or shells for us to use for the second semester B courses.

My colleague and I then update the course shells to prepare them for deployment to our live server.  We have a long list of changes that we make to the vendor course shells, which includes things like

• Updating and adding items to the general section
• changing the default behavior of URL content items (popup in a 850 - 650 window)
• Turning on activity completion, with specific student options
• Adding quiz and exam timers
• Sorting the item order of the gradable items in the gradebook
• Turning off all assignment, forum and quiz start and end dates (we have a rolling enrollment during the year)

AND

tweaking the gradebook so it displays scores the way we like, which includes a

• percentage of course completed
• current score
• ignores pre-test scores

This was a lot of work to figure out how to do this.  We actually got a little help from one of our vendors on how to do this. This is how it looks configured in all 200 of our courses

I also updated the decimal places to 0 for all the gradable items in our courses.  These scores appear in the gradebook user and grader reports, and my custom progress report.  That was a total of about 10000 items (200 / 10000) = 50 gradable items per course (quizzes, assignments, forums).  I did this en-mass in the DB table like this:

update mdl_grade_item
set decimals = 0
where courseid = xx

I used a between clause like this between xx AND xx - once I had verified the results in a single item and then in an entire course.

The trick is to create categories with specific types of aggregation that you want to use on the items in the category.  Following these steps

1- go to a course, open the gradebook Admin|Grades
2 - From the select menu choose Full view under Categories and Items 
3 - Scroll to the bottom of the view
4 - Click the Create category button
   a - choose a name, like Average of Completed assignments
   b - choose aggregation type, like mean of scores

5 - Once the category is created, MOVE THE GRADABLE ITEMS INTO IT, or create new ones and place them into the category.  I selected all the gradable items and used the move into.... option in the bottom of the view to then select the newly created category.  Whew!

This looks simpler in hindsight, but was not trivial to set up.