Activity completion improvement to provide more verbose detail for failures to complete required grade criteria

Since the tweaks to activity completion were rolled out via 3.11 (see https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Student_activity_completion) it has been noticed that when you have an activity — particularly an Assignment — set to with a grade to pass (optionally using a simple 3 criteria scale) and an activity completion to require a grade, any students who do not receive a passing grade for that activity are now shown a fail notification without any further information in that notification to indicate what was specifically required — numeric grade or scale value wise — for that activity to pass it. 

Unlike the activity completion report which will show expanded information to course/site admins upon mouseover, students who are now shown their completion state in 3.11 are left with an alarming FAIL visual

To their mind, an absence of clarifying detail at a glance indicates they have just failed the activity outright. Some institutions are understandably concerned at the level of angst this may cause and some do not prefer to use pass/fail binaries as they are not the preferred way of assessing student completion and engagement. Fully understanding that Moodle cannot be all things to all people, the best compromise here would be to simply provide students with more information about why failures (where passing grades apply) have occurred. This would ideally either show the grade or scale value required to pass the activity within or underneath the completion state notification on the course main page. Giving admins the option to modify the completion wording and colour of the notification based on their requirements would be the most ideal solution, but that might be a longer term commitment on the road to 4.0+'s  UX/UI improvements. 

In the interim, this CSS will hide all but manually marked items outright from view: 

// Custom CSS

}

/*Hides 3.11 Activity Completion notifications for all automatic (or criteria based) items*/

.automatic-completion-conditions .badge {

    visibility: hidden;

}

But the lack of legacy options (per the  ongoing discussion in https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-71856) to revert back to the old pre-3.11 checkbox style — alongside custom CSS usage in general — makes this an incredibly inelegant solution for those who want to retain student visibility of their completed course items.

I have tested this per the below steps on https://sandbox.moodledemo.net/ and replicated the same observations as were raised by the institution concerned (who are on 3.11.3) 

STEPS TO REPLICATE: 

1. Navigate to any 3.11+ site, login as an admin user and go to Site administration >> Grades >> Scales >> Add a new scale
2. Input and save a simple 3 point scale (i.e Not Satisfactory, Needs further work, Satisfactory)
3. Navigate to any course with at least a single student enrolled and add an Assignment activity. Ensure under the 'Grade' subsection, you apply the scale created in step 2, make the 'Grade to pass' value 3.00 and under the 'Activity completion' sub-section, change to 'Show activity as complete when conditions are met' and select ONLY the 'Require grade' criteria. Save and display.
4. Go to "View all submissions" within the Assignment activity and provide the student with a non-passing grade (i.e Not Satisfactory or Needs further work)
5. Log out and log in as the student. Go to the course and observe the 'Failed: Receive a grade' notification under the assignment activity with no further information provided to the student as to why. 

IMPROVEMENT SUGGESTIONS:

A) A change in the way individual activity completion displays on the main page of a course for activities such that if there is criteria causing the user to have failed completion, it is elaborated on where required (such as where a grade to pass comes into play) and is prominently visible. 

AND/OR

B) A change to instate legacy options to allow users to revert activity completion to the pre-3.11 display schema.