Question:
Why does Moodle have strange unit assessment scores or percentages that do not make mathematical sense?
Answer:
This is an issue peculiar to Moodle. Unfortunately, there are no known settings that NROC can control that will make Moodle score the built-in assessments in a logical way. And in some cases, Moodle seems to be pulling additional data from student work in the LTI tool that was not intended to be used within the Moodle gradebook environment.
Non-Assessment Data
Our system was not designed to transmit any scores to your LMS, but Moodle has a setting that "accepts" scores, which may account for some data being pulled over LTI. We designed the NROC Course Manager to manage data about student scores and we offer Excel exports from that system that you may be able to use in Moodle.
Unit-Level Assessment Data/Calculations
The unit-level assessments are installed into Moodle when the NROC installation file is originally set up, and rely on Moodle's own internal assessment engine for processing. When courses are replicated by your LMS admin, any additional institutional settings that were added locally may persist.
We provide a very limited amount of information in our IMSCC file (installation cartridge) about each question on the unit tests:
- the question itself
- the answer choices
- feedback on each answer choice (right or wrong)
- a scoring basis of 1 point per question
Moodle apparently does some calculations on that, computes "marks" in addition to a "grade", and comes up with strange numbers we cannot consistently explain.
There is nothing on the NROC side that "sends scores" to your Moodle gradebook aside from the assessment scores; whatever you see is coming from Moodle's own efforts to fill in the gradebook, appropriately or not.
Unusual scoring scenarios do not exist in all Moodle installations, leading us to believe that some Moodle administrators have modified their default settings in a way that circumvents this problem.
Recommendations
We recommend that Moodle administrators turn OFF the setting that allows Moodle to accept scores from the LTI tool. (In the LTI settings panel - "Accept grades from tool: Never") We do not support this "feature" of Moodle and we do not have any insight into the best way to make it work.
We designed the NROC Course Manager with export capabilities so that all users, regardless of LMS, can download student data in an Excel file and import it into any LMS in a more managed fashion using field mapping.
If you wish to make Moodle's assessment scoring work for your institution, we encourage you to reach out to Moodle's support community for assistance. If you are a Moodle administrator with information that can assist us in meeting Moodle's standards or explain how Moodle's scoring works, please get in touch with us.
Possible Solution:
One of our members has shared a possible solution for assessment scoring. We hope you find it helpful! (The only solution we have for additional data is to turn off "Accept Grades from Tool".)
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