[Building Sakai] Gradebook question - Sakai-graded tests and relative weights

[Wagner, Michelle R.]

Hi John,
Your point is definitely a good one; unfortunately, the gradebook is not set up to support that scenario at this time.   Behind the scenes, the item weight is actually identical to the points possible value for the gradebook item.  You just see a different label in the UI based upon whether your gradebook accepts points or percentages.  In the UI, points gradebooks read "Gradebook Item Point Value" and percentage gradebooks read "Gradebook Item Relative Weight" for the same field.  This is due to the fact that all grades are stored as points in the db, regardless of the grade entry type.  If you have a percentage gradebook, the gradebook calculates the equivalent point value based upon your input "item relative weight" upon saving and just re-converts it to a percentage for display.

So it sounds like the solution to your issue may be to add options to set weighting for the gradebook items within the category (decoupled from the points possible), a feature that does not currently exist.  It seems like Gradebook2 may be supporting this scenario, but I'm not positive.

Let me know if you have additional questions or need more clarification.

Have a wonderful day,
Michelle


On 5/4/10 3:35 PM, "Grossman,John E" <john.grossman at mdanderson.org> wrote:


I'm new to the Gradebook so  sorry if this is a known issue. There seems to be an undocumented and undesirable dependency between the internal point values for a quiz and the weight for that quiz as a component of a gradebook category.

When a test is graded by Sakai (2.6.0) and sent to the Gradebook, it forces the "Gradebook Item Point Value" to be equal to the number of points on the test. It isn't possible to set the "Gradebook Item Relative Weight" as you can with manually graded items. The impact of this is that if you want all the quizzes in a gradebook category to have equal weight, you have to normalize them so that they all have the same point values. This produces odd situations where a test with 80 questions has to have 1.25 points for each question and a test with 50 questions requires 2 points per question if you are normalizing to 100 points.

It seems like it would be better to allow the instructor to set the relative weight for each quiz independent of the point value. This behavior has caused a fair amount of confusion on the part of some of our instructors.

Am I missing something?

John
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