Configuring my Forums to appear in the Gradebook

We have a number of course developers, who have the benefit of also teacher 3rd party high school vendor courses.  Teaching the vendor courses allows them to see the use of forums in a course.  So, when they develop a course, they also add forums to them.  Probably more than necessary, but that is a different post.  The courses they developed are good, comprehensive, engaging, and use many of the good moodle activities.  When the teacher finishes developing the course, as if they are ever really finished, we put a freeze on it and do some final formatting of it.  One of the things we format is the Gradebook.  While looking in the Full view of the gradebook, I noticed that the forums did not appear. 

The forums on the course page did not show up in the gradebook.

In hindsight this is obvious why, but at first, not so clear.

We had to assign a point value and a aggregation type to get the forum to appear in the gradebook.

Interestingly enough, the forums did not have any point value initially assigned.  I guess this makes sense, but from what I hear, the students wont do anything unless there are course or grade points attached.  If there are no points associated with the activity, the students do not engage it.  Period.

So, we had to ask a couple of the teachers how many points to assign to the forum.  Most ended up being 5 points for participation.  A couple of the teachers defined a forum grading rubric and spelled out how many points and how they would earn them, nice.  Except, they still missed the part about assigning the points to the forum and the aggregation type.

A glance at the Full Gradebook - notice the 20 points assigned to the forums and 100 to the quizzes and assignments.

To assign the points and aggregation type to the forum so it would appear in the Gradebook

From the course page - turn editing on and edit the forum.

The teacher needs to assign the Aggregate type and the Scale values.

If either of these properties ARE NOT SET, the forum WILL NOT appear in the gradebook.