Moodle: Quiz - Automatic and Manual Grading

This article explains the different between automatic and manual grading for Moodle quizzes and provides some manual grading methods.

Automatic vs Manual Grading

Most quiz questions (multiple choice, true/false, etc.) can be automatically graded, meaning that Moodle will auto-calculate a score for the question. If a quiz has only automatically graded questions, then the total score for the quiz will be available as soon as the student completes their attempt.

Manually graded questions, on the other hand, must be evaluated by a grader. For example, essay questions must always be manually graded. Moodle will not calculate the total score for a quiz if there are still questions that need to be manually graded.

Enabling manual grading for an entire quiz

To enable manual grading for your quiz including automatically graded questions:

• Click your quiz on the course page

• Click the Settings tab

• Under Question behavior: How questions behave, select "Manually graded"
• Click either "Save and return to course" or "Save and display" at the bottom of the screen

Manual grading methods

Grading every student consecutively per question

To grade responses for manually graded questions all at once:

• Click your quiz on the course page

• Click the Results tab

• Click the “Grades” drop-down and select “Manual Grading”

• Under Total, click "grade all"
  • If you have already graded responses, you can also click "update grades" under Already graded to re-grade those responses.
• Student responses will be listed here. Add marks/comments to each question, then click "Save and go to next page"
  • Check the "Questions per page" value: if the value is less than the total number of responses, the next page will contain more responses for the same question.
    • For example, if the "Questions per page" value is 5 and there are 10 responses, the next page will contain the remaining 5 responses.
• Once you have finished marking/commenting, scroll to the top of the page and click the "Back to list of questions" link

Grading individual attempts and question responses

If you want to individually grade specific student attempts/responses:

• Click on your quiz on the main course page
• Click on the "Attempts" link in the middle of the page
• To review/grade a student's entire attempt:
  • Under First name / Surname, click "Review attempt" beneath the student's name
  • You will see the student's responses to each question. Click on "Make comment or override mark" in the green boxes below the questions you want to grade, which will create a pop-up window.
  • Add comments, assign a mark, then click "Save". The window will automatically close after a couple of seconds.
  • Once you have finished commenting/marking that attempt, click "Finish review" either at the bottom of the page or under Quiz navigation in the top right. This will bring you back to the main quiz page.

Questions?

If you need further assistance or have specific questions that aren't covered in this article, please don't hesitate to reach out for personalized support by submitting a Moodle Support ticket. 

Acknowledgement 

Created by Aleksander Prasolov '24, Thu 3/3/22. Last modified by Sam Johnson-Lacoss, Thu 9/14/23.