Managing a Gradebook Using Groups in Moodle

Grading with Groups

If you are using a merged course that combines multiple sections into a single course, or if you have created groups in your course manually (see Organizing users into Moodle Groups), it is possible to view the gradebook by individual sections (e.g., you want to view or edit grades for students in section 02 only). To filter by group within the gradebook, you must first enable group mode within your course settings.

Enabling group mode

1. Select the “Settings” tab from the course page.
2. Expand the Groups menu.
3. From the Group mode drop-down, select either Separate groups or Visible groups. While it does not matter which you select for the purposes of sorting by groups within the gradebook, this choice can affect the behavior of newly-created activities; see below for more information and caveats.
4. Make sure to click [Save and display] to save your selection and return to your course.

Important: Ensure that the Force group mode setting (located directly below Group mode) remains set to No. Setting this to ‘Yes’ will forcefully override the settings of all existing activities in your course, potentially locking students out of previously accessible assignments or forums.

Sorting the gradebook by a specific group or section

1. Navigate to the gradebook by selecting the “Grades” tab.
2. Click [Grader report] on the resulting page, if it is not already selected.
3. Within the drop-down box labeled Separate groups or Visible Groups (depending on your selection above), you can choose to display a single group’s grades or grades for all students.

Caveats

You should be aware that whichever group mode you select for your course will become the default group mode for any newly-created activities (e.g., assignments, forums, etc.) moving forward (but note, existing activities will remain in whatever setting they had prior to setting a new default). Here are the differences between the two options:

• Separate groups: group members can only see activities made by other members of their own group
• Visible groups: group members can see activity from anyone in the course, but can only interact with members of their own group

As an example, in a forum set to Separate groups, a student would only see and be able to reply to postings from other members in the same group, but when set to Visible groups, the student could see all postings from other students in the class, but could only reply to posts from other members in the same group.

Since this change only affects group settings for activities created after making the choice, any existing activities will remain set to the original course default, which is generally No groups (everyone can see and interact with anyone else’s activity regardless of group). Keep in mind that changing this setting applies group mode to all new activities by default. If you don’t want to manually change this setting back to ‘No groups’ every time you create a standard assignment or forum, you may want to build your main course activities before enabling the course-level group mode.