Moodle app grades and outcomes and what the students see

The following is a look at what the students see on the Moodle apps in terms of their grades and performance.

iOS iPhone

This is the iOS Moodle app. Note that the course includes evaluation of course learning outcomes. This confused the student because they appear to have a C, a D, and two grades of F. That is not the case. The only grade that is being counted towards their course grade is the 76% C mark. The three in red are course learning outcomes and do not enter into the course grade calculation.

That the learning outcomes do not count in the final grade can be seen in the Gradebook setup available to the instructor. Note that the Max grade for the Outcomes cannot be controlled by the instructor.

The scale rating values are set monotonically starting with one (or zero depending on a setting controlled only by the Moodle admin) and increase by one with each rating. The default is to start at one (No evidence) with Optimal then having a value of 4 for a 1-2-3-4 scale. This cannot be altered to a 0-3-4-5 scale as was possible in Canvas allowing Optimal to be equivalent to 100%, Sufficient 80%, and Suboptimal 60%.

For the Suboptimal rating the Moodle app is informing the student that they have a score of 33%, which has a very strong negative impact on the student. In Canvas Suboptimal was set to be 3 out of 5 or 60%, a low D and not a 33% deep F.

The scores seen above are derived from evaluation of the course learning outcomes separate from a rubric that is marking performance on the laboratory report (outcomes cannot be included in a rubric). Sufficient is "sufficient mastery of the student learning outcome" or "sufficient demonstration of the student learning outcome" and was considered to be "sufficient" for the purposes of saying the student was successful on the outcome. Given the monotonic scale, Sufficient should be 3 out of a Max possible of four, but Moodle is reporting that as a 67% D in the Moodle app. Moodle is apparently calculating Sufficient as 2 out of 3 for some reason. In Canvas "Sufficient" was pegged at 80%. Suboptimal is being calculated as 1 out of 3 despite the Max grade clearly being 4 and not 3. 

As noted in an earlier article, the student learning outcomes can be exported for reporting into Nuventive Improve. That said, the impact on the students of those ratings - which do not even impact their grade - may be too negative to retain. Whether there is a setting to hide those course learning outcome evaluations from the students is not known to this author. 

A workaround might be to rig a scale that forces the ratings to come out closer to the desired values. The complication is that at present the aggregation method, which is set by Moodle admin, starts scales at 1. Changing the aggregation method, however, could have unintended negative consequences across the platform at this point. 

When asked, the student did not know how they were performing overall in the course. The reason was that the course total was at the bottom of roughly 80 items. The large number of items is because each of the 16 laboratories has three course learning outcomes displayed as seen above. Add in quizzes and their associated learning outcomes and the result is a large number of line items. The student had not scrolled down far enough to see the course total. 

Android

On Android the scroll issue is harder to photograph. Not only are there the 80 plus items to scroll through, for some reason each line is has an enormous line height with large blank areas between items. Note the blank space below in the above image. This is a different student from the student on iOS above.

Scrolling down off the bottom of the earlier image reveals the mark for this assignment amid a sea of white space. The watchword in Moodle is "Scroll down" and then scroll down some more. 

The Android app has the same display of the course learning outcome evaluations. At least in this case the student has 100% (Optimal rating) on this assignment. The display being in red, with the x, however, is disconcerting. Optimal is 100% but that implies that Moodle is using 4 out of the Max grade of 4. 

Scrolling all the way to bottom of the page, a long process, does display the course total grade. But the 32.43% had the student very concerned. Was their grade 100% or 32.43%? 

The answer was back at the top of the very long scroll: that is the calculated weight of the quizzes item. The student, however, had no clue that this was the meaning of that value.

Scrolling back down one can see how the calculated weight works. The laboratories are carrying 67.57% of the weight, the quizzes 32.43% of the weight. These are being automatically calculated. In this course the weight is carried "naturally" by the points themselves. 

My thanks to the students who let the author photograph their cell phones. 

Post-script

An earlier article covered how to change the summary values in the gradebook from real to percentage or letter grade or a combination thereof. There was an unintended consequence of this change. 

The change also changed the display in the Grader. When marking a resubmission, as seen above, knowing what the previous score was is useful information. While the original score could be recovered by multiplying 0.72 by the total possible points, that is an extra step. 

Switching to Real (Percentage) is more useful when marking a resubmission. This then impacts the gradebook as well. The Grades: Course Grade Settings: Grade Item Settings: Grade display type is apparently a global setting for the course.

A second post-script on what the students see

In laboratory one the Allowed attempts were set to be Unlimited with new attempts granted Automatically. During the seven days after the laboratory the students can resubmit an assignment as many times as they wish. In Canvas this just means that the Submission icon remains visible and active. 

In the Moodle app the student sees a message not unlike the message seen above. The message carries the implication that the assignment is overdue and should be submitted because the assignment has not been graded. At least that is what the message above means to some of the students. This appears at the top of the assignment screen on the Moodle app for students. If the students scroll down, and then scroll down some more, they will see that they do have a submission submitted and a grade on that submission. 

The above Submission message was particularly puzzling for students who had already scored all 25 points on the laboratory assignment. They asked why they needed to resubmit and what they should change on a resubmission. The students had not scrolled down and seen their grade on the assignment. 

For laboratory two the Grant attempts is set to Manually. 

This setting has the upside that once a student has obtained all of the possible points, a next attempt can be disallowed by leaving the default setting of No. Laboratory reports that can still be improved can be granted an additional attempt. The downside is that if a student realizes that they have made an error, the student may have to wait for the instructor to mark the assignment with the error present and then grant an additional attempt before the student can submit the corrected assignment (depending on some of the other submission settings which interact with whether a student can resubmit prior to an assignment being marked).