Moodle: Creating custom scales for grading

It is possible to create a custom grading scale that you can use for most of your assignments in Moodle. Creating the scale is not very challenging, although it is important to understand how scales are calculated into the Gradebook.

You can use words, numbers, or symbols to indicate your items in your scale, but Moodle will use your values to represent points along a 100 point scale and use the percentage for calculation purposes. 

Explanation

Let's say you want to grade assignments using [No Credit, ✔️➖, ✔️,✔️➕] scale.  This scale has only 4 scale items in it, with 'No Credit' being the lowest and ✔️➕ being the highest.  Moodle will equate No Credit to 0%, ✔️➖ to 33%, ✔️ to 66% and ✔️➕ 100%.

However, if you want your ✔️➖ equal 85%, ✔️ equal 90% and the ✔️➕ equal 95%, then you would create your Moodle Scale as shown below. If you don't want to use some of the values, you don't have to have anything in the scale item column, but you do need to have the empty spaces.

Creating a new Moodle Scale

1. Within the Gradebook Setup, Click on the Scales tab
2. Click the "Add a New Scale" button at the bottom of the screen.
3. Give your scale a name (something that will be explanatory to you)
4. Add specifics about your scale in the Description box.
5. Enter your scale items in ASCENDING order with commas between them. 
6. Save changes.

Example

Using the above scale, you would copy/paste the following text into the Scale field of your new Scale.

NC,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,➖,✔️➖,✔️➖,✔️,✔️➕,✔️➕

This would result in your scale looking like this when used in Moodle assignment:

File Template

The Excel spreadsheet attached to this article contains the percentage values of each scale item based on how many items are in the scale.  Feel free to use it as a template for figuring out how many items you may want in your custom scale.

Questions?

Click on the Report Issue button on the upper right of this page.

Acknowledgments

Created by Carly Born, Mon 12/12/22.