Grading Categories
Grades from various activities (here referred to as grade items) in a Moodle course can be grouped into grading categories. The overall grade in a category is calculated from the individual grades of the grade items that belong to that category.
In every Moodle course, there is automatically a top-level grading category, which takes the course title as its name and combines all grading aspects and any sub-categories into an overall course grade.
Gradebook Setup
An overview of the available grade items and categories can be found in the “Gradebook Setup”.
For this, click on the “Grades” tab in the top navigation bar and then select “Gradebook Setup” from the dropdown menu.
The “Gradebook Setup” overview page shows you the available grade items and categories, their respective maximum grades, and weights.
Existing categories can be edited by clicking on the three dots in the “Actions” column. To add your own category, click on “Add category”.
Settings for the Grading Category
This will open the settings menu for a new grading category. We recommend to click on “Show more …” to display additional settings.
Once you have done this, you can access all the available settings for the grading category.
Next, we will briefly go over the respective parameters and explain them.
First, you need to assign a name to the category.
The next item, “Aggregation”, determines how the individual grading items within the category are combined to create an overall grade for the category. The grades of the individual grade items are first converted into percentages (a number between 0 and 1), then combined according to the selected aggregation method. The overall result is then converted so that the final grade for the category falls within the range between the minimum grade (0) and the maximum grade (1-100) for the category.
In the table Types of Aggregation (see below), all the aggregation methods for calculating your overall results are listed with a brief example.
With “Exclude Empty Grades”, you can specify whether ungraded or unsubmitted assignments should be ignored or automatically graded as 0. By default, empty grades are excluded from the overall grade. If you check the box, missing grades will be ignored when calculating the overall grade. Please note that this may affect the overall grade depending on the aggregation method used.
The setting “Drop the Lowest” allows you to specify whether a set number of the lowest grades should be excluded from the final calculation.
The next item, “Category Total Name”, is the name that represents the total grade for the grading category. This also appears in the Grading Overview.
“Item Info” is an optional field where you can add additional information regarding the overall grade. This is not visible to students.
By entering an ''ID Number'', you can uniquely identify this category and use it for grade calculation. This is also optional.
The settings for grade type, scale, maximum grade and minimum grade are set directly in the respective grade item and cannot be changed here.
The “Grade to pass” option sets the minimum grade required to pass. This value is used only in the activity and course completion settings.
In “Grade Display Type”, you define how the grades are displayed to participants in their grading overview (e.g., letter, points, percentages).
The setting “Overall Decimal Places” determines how accurately the result is displayed to participants. This does not affect the precision of the grade calculation.
Finally, you can set a “Weight” for the respective category. To do this, you must check the box and enter a value between 0 and 100 in the field below. This only has an effect if the category is a subcategory at the same time.
On the overview page, you can assign a grade item to a category by checking the box next to the grade item and clicking “Move ” (at the bottom of the page).