Grades 3 - Adding a grade item (or column in the gradebook)

How to use Moodle Grades (Gradebook) #3 Adding a grade item (or column) in the gradebook

There are several help sheets in this series. Start with Grades 1 - Introduction & Overview

Grade items are represented by columns in the Grader report.

Marking or returning marks through Moodle for a non-Moodle assessment

You might want to add a grade item for any assessment not directly related to a marked activity in Moodle, for example offline assignments, extra credit or tutor feedback, or to transfer marks from external assessment tools such as Rogo,

One way of doing this is to add a Moodle Assignment activity to your module page. Grades for this will automatically be included in the Gradebook. It can be useful, e.g., for returning grades and feedback for an offline assignment such as a presentation or lab work.  See creating a Moodle assignment.

OR, don't create a new assignment, just add a column to the Gradebook. Creating a column (it's called a grade item) in the Grader Report allows you to enter grades and make them visible to the students (or not, e.g., in the case of second marking) as appropriate.

To add a grade item (column)

1. In your module, click on the Turn editing on button (top right).

2.   In the Navigation block, click Grades. The Grader Report appears, containing each student’s grade for each assignment and assessment.  Students’ names are down the left column and assignments across the top.

3. In the Administration block click on  Gradebook setup. At the bottom if the screen you will see the option to add a grade item. This will create a new unpopulated column in the gradebook.

5. On the Grade item page:

 
 Note: A hidden grade will not be visible to students – you can uncheck this to release the grades when you are ready, or enable a date to make all grades available to students on that date.

Locking prevents changes to grades so it is unlikely that locking would be applied until the marking process is complete, if at all. For more information about locking or hiding grades see Grades 6: To hide a grade for a particular assignment, or a particular category of grades from the student.

If you are using Categories you can choose (under Parent category) to include this item in an existing category. Select the Grade category from the drop-down list. (You can change this at a later date if you need to.) See Grades 5: How to add and use categories in the Grader report

15. Click on the Save changes button.

To mark using this grade item

1. Grades for this item can be added for each student directly in the Gradebook (see Grades 2 - Manually editing grades) OR
2. Upload a spreadsheet containing the marks (see  Grades 4 - Exporting and Importing Grades into the Grade book )