Moodle hyphens and excluding empty grades impacts

At present the statistics gradebook has three categories.

Missing submissions are currently left as empty grades, hyphens in the grade book. There is no automated way to set a zero for a missing submission on the due date nor on the cut-off date. Manually setting a zero sets an override that must be manually cleared if the student subsequently submits an assignment. With 52 students and daily assignments, the workload of managing manual overrides meant that leaving grades empty was the most functional workload option.

The three categories are not weighted. All points are treated equally. The weights are those that arise from the points and is calculated by Moodle.

One coincidence may confuse the observant viewer. There are 206 total possible test points for the term. At present there are 206 points for assignments that are past their cut-off for submission date. This is a coincidence.

The default setting is to exclude empty grades. This meant that assignments which were not submitted did not count against the students. This led to students having grades that were based on only a handful of assignments submitted.

Note that the Exclude empty grades option is an example of inappropriate user interface design: one should not toggle on to activate a negative state. This toggle should have been "Include empty grades" and then left with the default being off. 

Click on the image to enlarge

The first three columns were the grades in MS 150 Statistics with the default setting of Excluding empty grades set to checked as seen above.  

At present in MS 150 Statistics there are 241 possible points. Of those 241 possible points 35 are in assignments that are still open for submission. There are 206 points that are no longer open for submission. Thus the first student with 81 points to date has a significant amount of missing work. The grade of A shown in the gradebook is inaccurate.

If empty grades are included for two of the categories, only test and data explorations, then every single student has an F, including a student with 198 points. This unexpected result was not checked or verified as this is production and students who were legitimately passing the course might panic at suddenly failing. These settings were reversed very quickly without further exploration or verification. 

The intent in selecting only two categories was to make tests and data explorations required submissions and to treat homework as practice - effectively making homework optional. Why did every student receive an F? Perhaps including empty grades at the category level counts all items in that category to the end of the term? 

If the empty grades setting is left at the default as being checked for every category, and then the course level MS 150 Statistics empty grade setting is unchecked, then the grades are as seen above in columns 7, 8, and 9. This setting is surprising in light of the previous result. This should have been worse for the students as this is a coursewide setting and should be inherited by the categories. And the categories, which were still checked, did not completely override the checked setting at the course level: the grades are not the same as the first three columns. Had the category level checks overridden, the grades should have mirrored those in the first three columns. 

A manual calculation using 206 in the denominator produces the grades in green. A manual calculation using 241 in the denominator produces the grades in blue. 

Post-script: Further reading and information

By default, Moodle will exclude empty grades from grade calculations rather then treating them as zeros so that grade items that are not yet complete do not lower students' averages. However, Moodle cannot distinguish between a grade item (such as a quiz) that the student has missed and one that has simply not yet been completed. For that reason, instructors must enter zeros for students that miss a quiz or assignment or the student will not be penalized for the missing grade.

The Exclude empty grades feature can be turned off, but this will cause course totals to appear excessively low until the end of the semester because all incomplete grade items will be calculated as zeros. This setting is configurable for the overall gradebook as well as any categories that may exist in the gradebook. The property is not inherited from the parent container, meaning that you can have Exclude empty grades turned of for the gradebook and still turned on for a category within the gradebook. If you want to disable this feature, you must do so for each and every category (and the gradebook) independently. - LSU Grok

While one can resolve the empty grade issue by leaving them excluded and then manually marking assignments as zeros, this generates the override issue where subsequent submissions do not automatically replace the zero. 

Moodle  documentation does not contradict the LSU Grok interpretation.

The "Exclude empty grades" option determines how Moodle handles activities that have not been graded yet.

If this option is enabled, Moodle will ignore any grade item that has no grade when calculating the category or course total. If it is disabled, Moodle will treat empty grades as zero when calculating averages or totals, ... - Moodle 4.5 documents

The first sentence does not disinclude future assignments. Moodle effectively requires the manual entry of zeros for missing assignments and then the exclusion of empty grades to get grade to make any sense. In light of this, the absence of an automatic zero option for unsubmitted assignments at the due date (or cut-off date) is problematic for instructors with over a hundred students and daily assignments. 

Coastal Carolina makes explicit the need to enter zeros for missing work. 

Beside Exclude empty grades:
1. check the box to have Moodle ignore the empty grades. You will need to add "0" for missed work. (RECOMMENDED)*

2. uncheck the box to have Moodle automatically calculate a "0" for every empty grade. (This will give students a failing grade for most of the semester.)

Note that using bulk editing to set all empty grades to zero checks the override. For automatically marked tests there are no notifications. The result is that if a student submits a test after the bulk edit, the instructor receives no notification and the student will still have a zero for the test. Because the override is performing as advertised: it is overriding. When it shouldn't. A subsequent submission should override the override. 

The college is using natural aggregation and in a related topic Northwestern Michigan College notes the following.

Excluding Grades in the Moodle Gradebook

The Excluded setting in the grade book allows you to exclude a grade for an individual student from being included in their grade aggregation.

NOTE: Excluded DOES NOT work when using Natural grade aggregation.