Using marking guide when grading Moodle forums

One of the options when grading a forum is to use a marking guide.

Adding a marking guide

If you want to use a marking guide, you will need to:

1. Go to your forum
2. Click on the 'Cogwheel' icon and select 'Edit settings'

3. Scroll down to the Whole forum grading and click on it

4. If you haven’t already chosen a Grade "Type", select either 'Point' or 'Scale' from the dropdown

5. Under “Grading method”, select 'Marking guide'

6. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the ‘Save and display’ button

7. This will take you to the Advanced grading page. On this page, you have two options to choose from which are 'Define new grading form from scratch' which will create a new marking guide and 'Create new grading form from a template' which will create a new marking guide based on an existing one. Select which one you need.

8. Give the marking guide a "Name" (and a "Description" if you want to

9. Add a "Title" for each criterion, a "Description for students", a "Description for markers" (these can be the same or different) and a "Maximum score"

10. If you need to add more criterion, click on the '+ Add criterion button'

11. You can add "Frequently used comments" to the marking guide. To add more click on the '+ Add frequently used comments'

12. There are some "Marking guide options" which give the option to show or not show the definitions and scores to students.

13. Then you can either 'Save as draft' or 'Save marking guide and make it ready'

Marking a forum using a marking guide

To start grading the forum contributions using the marking guide, you will need to:

1. Go to the forum you want to grade
2. Click on the ‘Grade users’ button which will open the forum grading.

On the page, you will be able to see all contributions by a student in that forum. This includes both discussion posts and any replies that they make.

3. The marking guide will be on the right side of screen, here you can grade each criterion and add comments

4. If you want to notify the student of the grading select ‘Yes’ from the Notifications email

5. Click on the 'Arrow' icons to navigate to the next student or click on the 'Magnifying glass' icon to search for a particular student

6. When you have finished grading, click on the ‘Save’ button in the top right corner

Similar tutorials

• How to add a forum 
• How do I enable whole forum grading?
• How to grade forums using whole forum gradings
• Using rubrics when grading Moodle forums
• How do I set up areas for student collaboration in Moodle? 
• How to use a Forum for blogs or learning journals

• How to create a rubric for a Moodle assignment

• Marking using Rubrics in Assignments