Moodle

I'm not convinced - but I am not dismissing the idea either.

This is probably not difficult to implement if anyone wants to have a go at it. You probably just need to edit /question/comment.html to change the <input type="text" ... to a <select ...

Well my original reason was that I mark using the (my) AJAX marking block, which will soon find its way to the modules and plugins database. I click on the students name from the front page and get the single-question grading pop-up, but if they have written nothing, or gibberish (not that uncommon with some of them), to give them 0, I can't just press save, as there will be no change to the database and it will still appear as unmarked. My thinking was that a dropdown which started with 'ungraded' would be a better option as then it would differentiate between 'ungraded' and 'deliberate zero' and necessitate a db write.

On the other hand, I may have just been inelegant with my admittedly amateur SQL. Is there any db change that I have missed if I submit the question without altering the grade or comments?

One difficulty is to decide which options should be in the drop-down. That would have to be based on the question max grade, and the number of decimal places set in the quiz. But if you do the naive thing there, then in some situations you would have thousands of options.

To answer your question of a long time ago: The logic for whether a set of inputs counts as actually assigning a manual grade is in question_process_comment in lib/questionlib.php. I'll leave it to you to read the code. Then, the correct way to detect if a state is already graded is just a check on $state->event, which you can do in pure SQL - have a look at mod/quiz/report/grading in HEAD (not on the 1.9 stable branch.)

I guess that what you could do is look at the max grade for the question, and the number of decimal places used, and if the number of possibilities is < 100, use a dropdown, otherwise use a text box.

I see what you mean, but in reality, how often would someone give a question 3.7 points? It would be more sensible to give it 37 and then scale the grade to a max of 10 in the quiz setup. I could see giving increments of 0.5, but if the assignment code works without half percents, then maybe the quiz code will be ok too? I think that overall, the convenience of a dropdown is more useful than the convenience of being able to manually specify 3.7 on the odd occasions when it's needed, simply on the basis that the dropdown is useful every time, whereas the manual decimal point are only useful sometimes (rarely?) and can be worked around easily with a one off action during quiz setup.

What do you reckon?