True, much of my time and writing now is being spent at my new connectivism course blog , but at the same time I am grading exams in Moodle 1.9 and am engaged in a fight to the death with the new Gradebook.
To understand this sucker seems to require an advanced degree in mathematics, and prior intensive participation in its development. I have neither. The big complaints so far are:
- Scales in forums now translate automatically as percentages in gradebook.? You cannot stop this. You create a quantitative scale (i.e. “good post”, “pretty good post”, “needs some research”) and it translates it to the percentage grade out of how many items you have (in this case, three, so a student would get 66% for a “pretty good post”). It’s horrible. My scales are truly qualitative, and a high or low isn’t necessarily implied. For example, some of my scales for forums have “related to readings”, “reply to colleague”, “focused on lecture”. These do not have numerical equivalencies. The only way to turn it off seems to be at the full-site level, where doing so would also eliminate the possibility to have numerical scales aggregated into the grade. The only way to get scales ignored seems to be to use the simple “Sum of Grades” aggregation only. Right now I’m using the Quick Feedback to “grade” my onsite students’ homework, which is horribly clumsy.
- You can’t have extra credit within a quiz. My quizzes all have 22 questions, with 11 maximum points, for a total of 10 points credit. Get that? One of the questions is “extra credit”, but it doesn’t matter which one. In Moodle 1.8, I could set the quiz maximum score at 11, and the maximum score for that quiz as a gradebook item at 10. Then if someone got 10.5, it would just add the extra in, but everything would calculate correctly in terms of percentage.Now I have to make my course total 110 points, and recalculate the entire letter scale so it fits properly.
And, on the page where you can edit all the various levels of grades (full course, category, category total, item — it’s ridiculously complicated), you cannot use Ajax (drag-and-drop) to organize things into categories, because of “accessibility issues”. Really, cumbersome isn’t the word. Just look at a section of instructions on how to use it:
I’m sure I’ll find more awful things. The big problem is that this is not just a situation where familiarity will solve the problems — it’s a big deal for novice users (and I’m not even one of those). I have always encouraged Moodle as being great for novices, and all novices start with the same three features (announcements, forums, and gradebook). Such complexity in the name of creating a more “robust” gradebook is unforgivable, and has undermined my encouragement to others to use Moodle.
To use a dinner-time analogy, a big hunk of meat on the table is impressive, but it is not much use if you can’t cut it with the knife you have. My carving knife broke using this new gradebook, and now I’m looking for a hatchet.
Thank you Lisa. We have Moodle 1.9 but it is our clients that will need to use it for the Gradebook and we need to know how to explain around the aberrant behaviors you are describing. Your post is much appreciated! Lee Allan Sanders
Very good post Lisa. I don’t consider myself a Moodle novice either but I also have great difficulties with the latest gradebook. I know of very few people who do rate it. It’s as if the developers thought more complex+ more features=better, whereas in fact, sometimes the simpler a thing is, the better!
My colleagues and I are trying to wrap our heads around the new 1.9 gradebook, and we are all quite frustrated.
What is the difference, in layman’s terms, between “weighted mean of grades” and “simple weighted mean of grades”? One must truly rely on some background in mathematics to understand this. It would certainly do me good to understand the difference, but who has time in the middle of a semester to attend the 2-3 hours of training it would require to use the gradebook effectively?
Regarding your forum grades, would it be possible to continue grading qualitatively and simply assign the forum as “uncategorized” or give it zero weight in the grade calculation?
Dispersemosm I do not know what the difference is except as a result; I know I tried different weightings to get what I wanted, but like you say, 2-3 hours (or more for the mathematically challenged) had already been invested.
I will look at your suggestion for creating a separate category for the qualitative forum assessments — it sounds like a really good idea!
The 1.9 Gradebook IS a nightmare. Not only do Workshop scores not even appear in the gradebook, neither Drop Lowest nor Extra Credit designations actually remove the dropped or extra points from the category total. And now on the Moodle Bug Tracker the developers have agreed that this is a feature and works as intended.
I want 1.8’s gradebook back. It was far easier to use. I actually liked it better than WebCT’s.