Getting Started with the Moodle Gradebook 

All the grades for each student in a course can be found in the course gradebook, or 'Grader report', accessed from the Course navigation. 

The grader report collects items that have been graded from the various parts of Moodle that are assessed, and allows you to view and change them as well as sort them out into categories and calculate totals in various ways. When you add an assessed item in a Moodle course, the gradebook automatically creates space for the grades it will produce and also adds the grades themselves as they are generated, either by the system or by you. 

The grades displayed are initially displayed as the raw marks from the assessments themselves, so will depend on how you set those up e.g. an essay out of 36 will appear as however many raw marks that student got, not a percentage (although this can be changed later, see below). 

Note that various default options for the gradebook are set at system level by the administrator in and can be marked as being overridable by you, or fixed. This means that the options will not always be set up the same way for every user when they see the grader report for the first time. 

How Grading Works in Moodle 

The aggregation dropdown menu lets you choose the aggregation strategy used to calculate the overall grade of a grade category.  

Available aggregation types menu 

Available aggregation types setting 

By default, the only available aggregation type is 'Natural.' 

Aggregation strategy 

All grades are first converted to percentage values (interval from 0 to 1), then aggregated using one of the strategies below and finally converted to the associated category item's range (between Minimum grade and Maximum grade). In the following, we assume that all Minimum grades are equal to 0. 

Mean of grades 

In yields the sum of all grades divided by the total number of grades. For instance: assume a category A (with a Maximum grade equal to 100) includes three items, A1, A2 and A3 (with maximum grades equal to 100, 80 and 10, respectively); if a student scores A1=70, A2=20 and A3=10, then we have the following grade calculation for A: 

Weighted mean 

Each grade item can be given a weight to change its importance in the overall mean. In simple terms, the category "total" will be equal to the sum of the scores in each grade item, each multiplied by its grade weight, and that sum is finally divided by the sum of all weights. This is shown in the following example (with the same assumptions as the previous case). 

Simple weighted mean 

The difference from the Weighted mean is that the weight of each item is its Maximum grade.  

Median of grades 

The middle value (or the mean of the two middle values) when percentages (the ratios between grades and their maximum values) are arranged in order of value. The advantage over the mean is that it is not affected by outliers (grades which are uncommonly far from the mean). 

Lowest grade 

The result is the smallest grade after normalisation. It is usually used in combination with Aggregate only non-empty grades. 

Highest grade 

The result is the highest grade after normalisation. 

Mode of grades 

The mode is the normalised grade that occurs the most frequently. It is often used for non-numerical grades. The advantage over the mean is that it is not affected by outliers (grades which are uncommonly far from the mean). However, it loses its meaning once there is more than one most frequently occurring grade (only one is kept) or when all the grades differ. 

Natural