End Your Semester Using Moodle Grading Features

With the semester quickly coming to an end, you may have a long to-do list to wrap-up your courses. This teaching tip serves to give you a few tips to save you some time submitting your grades to reduce the end-of-the-semester stress. If you would like one on one assistance, schedule an appointment with an instructional designer at e-LIS

Using Grading Features on Moodle 

One of the biggest time commitments for faculty is grading student work. Luckily, Moodle has a few features that allow for quick grading: rubrics, bulk insert of grades, and easy grade submission. 

Using Rubrics to Grade Assignments

When grading papers, creating a rubric or grading guide in Moodle can really streamline your process. Using these grading tools may take a little bit of time to set up initially but once you have your rubric or grading guide set up, you can grade all of your students’ submissions directly in Moodle. No need to download and re-upload files. For more information about grading guides, view this grading guide support document. For more information about rubrics, view the rubric support document.

Bulk Insert Grades

If you need to bulk enter 0s for assignments, you can quickly and easily do that with the single view option in the Moodle grade book. If you are looking to view all the grades for a single student or a single assignment, then Single View is the place for you. 

Go into your Moodle gradebook, select Single View from the drop-down menu and from here, you can select individual students or individual assignments. 

From this view, instructors can bulk insert some grades, especially zeros, because empty grades don’t count against students. When faculty are finalizing their gradebook for the end of the semester, this can come in handy to bulk enter in any 0s for missing assignments to make the gradebook total accurate before submitting grades for the end of the semester. 

To bulk insert grades, select an assignment by clicking select a grade item above, then scroll down to the bottom of the page, select empty grades, then insert new grade as 0 and click save.

Submitting Your Grades

The last thing to save you some time as you gear up for the holiday break is submitting your grades. Instead of jumping back and forth between Moodle and Banner (SAIL), you can simply export your grades to Banner (SAIL) using a few mouse clicks. 

Navigate to the gradebook, then in the drop down menu, select export, ensure that the grades on the screen are correct for your students, then check the box to the right of their name and click save. To see these steps in detail watch the grade export to banner video.

Save and adapt a Google Doc version of this teaching tip.

About the Author

Chad Bousley is an Instructional Designer at e-LIS, who helps faculty with online course design, creating interactive activities and implementing online teaching best practices.  Outside of the classroom, Chad enjoys learning foreign languages and playing guitar. 

Edited by Rachel Smydra, Faculty Fellow, Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Oakland University. Image by Katerina Holmes. Others may share and adapt under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC.

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