Setting Up a Gradebook in Moodle

A gradebook is a powerful tool in Moodle that allows you to manage student grades for various activities within your course. It lets you collect scores from graded activities, view existing marks, and even manually enter grades for offline activities.

Creating Gradebook Categories

1. Access Gradebook Setup: Click the gear icon in the top right corner of your course page and select “Gradebook setup.” This will open a new page displaying all graded items in your course.

2. Organize with Categories: You’ll see a “Weights” column for each graded item, used to determine its relative importance (more on this later). For now, let’s focus on organizing. Click the “Add category” button. In this example, we’ll create three categories for our three graded item types: Assignment, Quiz, and Simulation. You can create as many categories as needed for your course.

3. Name and Save Categories: After clicking “Add category,” provide a descriptive name for each category and click “Save changes.”

4. Assign Items to Categories: Drag and drop the graded items to their corresponding categories using the arrow icon next to each item name. This helps organize your gradebook and makes assigning weights easier.

Assigning Weights

Weights determine the relative importance of each category or individual graded item within a category. For instance, you might consider assignments the most significant and assign them a higher weight (e.g., 50).

1. Set Category Weights: After organizing your items, click the checkbox next to the category you want to weight (e.g., Assignment) and enter the desired weight (e.g., 50). Moodle automatically adjusts other category weights to ensure they all add up to 100. You can define weights for all categories or leave some unweighted (all unweighted categories will share equal weight).

2. Optional: Individual Item Weights: If desired, you can further refine your weighting system by assigning weights to individual graded items within each category.

3. Save Changes: Once you’ve set your weights, click “Save changes” in the bottom left corner to finalize your gradebook setup.