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

[Algaze, Louis J]

John,

One of the ways we work around this issue is by using Categories and
Weighting.  Instructors create a category with a weight for each test/quiz
and put only one gradebook item into that category.  This allows any point
value in the assessment while allowing the results to contribute a specified
percentage to the final grade.

I hope this helps,

Louis


On 5/5/10 5:55 AM, "Wagner, Michelle R." <wagnermr at iupui.edu> wrote:

> 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 ³Gradebook
> Item Point Value² and percentage gradebooks read ³Gradebook Item Relative
> Weight² 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 ³item relative weight² 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 I¹m 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:
> 
>> 
>>> I¹m 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 ³Gradebook Item Point Value² to be equal to the number of points on the
>>> test. It isn¹t possible to set the ³Gradebook Item Relative Weight² 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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