Currently the Forums grading interface is problematic for several reasons.

• A user must first manually create a gradebook item in the Gradebook before a forum or topic can be associated with the item. There is no option to create the gradebook item via Forums.

• There is no place in the Forums tool where students can view their grade feedback. (This is particularly true of rubrics, since rubric items attached to forums/topics do not display rubric feedback to the student anywhere at all - not even in the gradebook.)

• Even after associating a forum/topic with a particular gradebook item, the user can easily send grades to a different gradebook item by choosing a different selection in the drop-down menu. 

• When using the bulk grading interface to grade forum posts, the associated gradebook item does not show up selected by default. It must be re-selected by the user before entering grades.

In order to streamline the workflow and make grading more consistent across Sakai, we would like to modify Forums so that it uses a centralized grading service. This service would be used by all Sakai tools that generate grades, including the Gradebook. Using this new service would accomplish the following:

• allow the user to create gradebook items at the same time they create forums/topics

• allow for feedback on Forum grades to be accessed via the tool interface as well the Gradebook interface

• standardize grading so that the forum/topic grade entry interface is consistent, and that scores are always sent to the appropriate gradebook item

• reduce the overall amount of code in the Forum tool itself, since the grading service will be called to handle grading logic