Moodle

Attached a patch with the proposed fix.

You can see this patch into effect on http://test.moodle.org/1.9
username: teacher
password: testm00dle

This looks really good Nicolas! I really think this will cut down on confusion with our faculty. Thank you for taking this task on.

The only thing that I see that seems to be different from previous behavior is that clicking on the edit category button for the root (course) category show a field "Current parent aggregation" which has no value. On child categories this shows up in a "Parent Category" fieldset. I feel that on the root category it should probably not be show at all.

Also, it seems to be standard behavior, but how come the default name of the root category isn't placed in the "Category Name" field by default? It seems like that name should be in the field by default, with the user option to change the value if they feel they need or want to. No big deal, but it's always struck me as odd.

Overall, this is a great improvement IMHO. Thank you.

Thanks for the feedback, Paul.

I will remove this "informational" field from the course category form, it wasn't meant to appear there at all.

Regarding the name of the course total, what strikes you as odd is actually a default behaviour. When you create a course, this course category is automatically created, and no name is given to it. If it stays with no name, it will default to showing the course name. If the teacher wants to change its name, this will override the course name and be used instead. If he should want to revert to the course name, he can just remove the course category name entirely.

One reason for this behaviour is that we don't want to allow an empty name for any category.

It could probably be improved

Finished in HEAD. Will backport to 1.9 soon

Need to backport to 1.9.5

I just had a look at this and wasn't sure what 'Weight or extra credit' meant (never did know). The help pop-up wasn't a lot of use and really needs expanding by someone who knows what's going on.

Questions in my mind:

• What does a weighted grade actually do?
• Do all of the boxes have to have a value in them?
• Do all the weights have to add up to 100 or some similar number?
• What is the difference between weight and extra credit?
• What is the unit of the number in the box? does it depend on what is selected in the dropdown?

Also, the max grade thing is a little unclear. What happens if I manually change it on one of the category totals to be more or less than the actual sum of the category items?

Also, if I set a calculation for the category total, does this make the dropdown for that category redundant? If so, it should grey out or something.

Whoops - I meant to add these comments to MDL-15680. Copying them over now.

Matt, the max grade cannot be changed for a category set to "Sum of Grades". So your concern isn't warranted in this case. For all other aggregation types, you can set the maximum grade to anything you want, it is only really relevant when the parent category is set to "Simple weighted mean of grades", because in that case the child category's max grade determines its weight in the parent category's mean calculation.

The explanations of weight and extra credits are a separate issue, so I won't comment further here.

Solved in 1.9.5, waiting for confirmation before sending to CVS

Gradebook patch applied, resolving this issue.

The fact that the category total settings are called "Grade Item" is very confusing to my faculty. The term "Grade Item" is used elsewhere to mean "an item to be graded," so when my faculty see "Grade Item" on the Category creation page, they think it is a shortcut to add a grade item inside of that category.

Can we please call this "Category total" or something else that is more meaningful in this context?