Skip to:

  1. Skip to Jira Navigation
  2. Skip to Side Navigation
  3. Skip to Main Content

assignments, gradebook: creating % GB item with relative weight, then associating assignment to it, causes inflated grades

Description

Issue: You can create hugely inflated percentage scores for an assignment as follows. Your site has a Gradebook with grade entry in percentages, and you create a gradebook item with a Gradebook item relative weight (e.g. 5). Create an assignment of the same name with a point grade of 100 and associate it with the gradebook item you just created. Submit the assignment as at least two students. As instructor, give the students different scores (e.g. 80, 90), and release the grades. If you view the Gradebook, you'll see that the students' scores are e.g. 1600%, 1800%.

An instructor apparently discovered this issue a long time ago, but did not report it until now. I've successfully reproduced it in our local 2.9.1 and 10.2 instances, and on nightly2 in both 10.x maintenance branch and 11.

To reproduce:

  1. Create a site with a Gradebook and Assignments.

  2. In Gradebook, go to Gradebook Setup and select Percentages as the Grade Entry option. Save the changes.

  3. Create a new gradebook item, and enter a Gradebook Item Relative Weight of 5.

  4. Go to Assignments and create an assignment with the same name as the gradebook item.

  5. Choose the following options for the assignment:

    • Grade Scale: Points

    • 100 points possible

    • Under Grading, select Associate with existing Gradebook entry and choose the gradebook item you created with the same name as the assignment.
      Additional note: You might need to change the assignment's open date if you're testing before noon.

  6. As 2 different students, submit the assignment.

  7. Log in as instructor and Grade the assignment. Give each student a different score, e.g. 80 and 90.

  8. Go to Gradebook. The students' grades for the assignment will be hugely inflated, e.g. 1600%, 1800%.

Attachments

3
  • 26 Apr 2016, 08:54 AM
  • 26 Apr 2016, 08:54 AM
  • 26 Apr 2016, 08:54 AM

Activity

Show:

Neal Caidin July 20, 2017 at 1:33 PM

I'm assuming this is still a problem in the new gradebook (gradebookng)?

Charles Hedrick June 8, 2016 at 1:15 PM
Edited

Forum lets you choose an existing gb item, and doesn't let you choose a maximum point value. I'm guessing it keeps the value in the gradebook and not locally, in which case this problem doesn't exist. Assignment 2 works the same way. I think the core team believes that's how all the tools should work. Making Assignment work that way for 11.0 is probably not practical.

Charles Hedrick June 8, 2016 at 1:11 PM

I just tried some experiments. I'm not sure I understand the behavior.

I tried this with a version of the Assignment code that feeds maxpoints to the Gradebook when you associate an Assignment with an existing item.

I'm finding that percent mode seems to work.

  • create a gradebook item with weight of 5

  • create an assignment with a maximum point value of 50 and link it to the gradebook item

  • enter a grade of 50

It shows in gradebook as 100%, which is correct. If you edit the item it shows a weight of 50.
I created a second item, which is not linked, with a weight of 5. I entered a grade of 0.

The average now shows as 90.9%. I believe it's using the 50 as both the maximum point value and the weight.

I think this is unexpected, but it's not unexpected in quite the way I expected.

For the moment I'm not proposing to use the patch that I'm trying out.

I'm going to generate a PR for the Rutgers code. The community can take it or not if they prefer.

Tiffany Stull June 8, 2016 at 12:55 PM

I'm not sure if there's a way to do it, but would making the Assignments tool recognize when the Gradebook is set in percentages help fix the issue?

When associating a forum/topic to a GB item, I think Forums now detects whether the Gradebook is graded in points or percentages, and will only allow you to select the corresponding option for the associated forum/topic. The Assignments tool ONLY allows point grades to send to GB.

Kyle Blythe June 8, 2016 at 12:28 PM
Edited

Edit: Ah, I posted this without refreshing the screen, and didn't see 's response.

I agree with Tiffany on this. In my experience, the only reason users take the "associate with existing Gradebook item" approach (because it is actually rather inconvenient, and requires several more steps to accomplish than the traditional "Add item to Gradebook" item-creation process) is because it allows you to be able to enter/edit grades in either tool. Externally maintained GB items don't offer this ability, with the GB functioning more as a grade repository. If people have a mix of manually created GB items and externally maintained GB items, they associate with existing GB items in order to be able to do all of their grading within the Gradebook.

Without the ability to enter grades in both locations, I'm not sure I understand the utility of having an "associate with existing Gradebook item" option at all.

On a related note, I'm not seeing any issue with percent mode grading (at least, not when the assignment's total points and the GB item's "relative item weight" match up...as expected, things can get very weird very quickly when these don't match up). If there's an issue around percentage mode, however, perhaps the ability to use percentage mode with associated gb items should be limited?

Details

Priority

Affects versions

Components

Assignee

Reporter

Labels

Environment

Test servers: * https://qa11-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org * https://qa10-mysql.nightly.sakaiproject.org/ Win 7 Firefox 45.0.2

Created April 26, 2016 at 8:56 AM
Updated December 6, 2017 at 8:27 PM