Moodle - Whole Forum Grading (staff/faculty)
Whole Forum Grading lets you evaluate a student’s overall contribution to an entire forum with a single grade and feedback. A forum can contain multiple discussions, and this method considers the student’s work across all of them. In the grading view, you see every post the student made in that forum in one place, so you do not need to search through discussions. Whole Forum Grading does not combine posts from different forums, so grading and feedback must be completed separately in each forum.
Topics Covered In This Article
Enabling Whole Forum Grading
Navigate to the forum and select Settings.
Scroll down to and expand Whole Forum Grading. Select Point and enter a Maximum grade. Scroll to the bottom and select Save and Display. The Maximum grade is the grade that the activity is graded out of (not the weight). Forum posts are often graded out of 10.
If you only want to give students a grade and not feedback on their forum posts you can stop here. Continue on if you'd also like to give students feedback along with the grade.
Back at the top of the Forum, select Advanced grading.
From the advanced grading drop-down menu select Marking guide.
Select Define new grading form from scratch.
Set Name to Forum grade and feedback. Description can be left blank.
Scroll down and select Click to add criterion name. Enter Forum grade and feedback as the name.
Set the Maximum score to the same maximum score you set earlier.
Deselect Show guide definition to students. (Since we're not using criteria descriptions here, so we can hide this)
When you're done, select Save marking guide and make it ready.
How to Grade with Whole Forum Grading
Navigate to the forum and select Grade users.
On the left you'll see all posts made to this forum by the currently selected student. You can navigate to the discussion to see the post with more context by selecting the View discussion button under the post, which will display in a popup.
To navigate to a specific student use the arrows next to the student's name.
Enter the grade into the Score field and enter feedback into the Additional comments field. (if you didn't setup the marking guide in order to have feedback you won't see this field and the Score field will be named Grade)
Select Save at the top right to save the grade and feedback for this student and then move on to the next student.
Navigate through the students and repeat this process until all of the students have received grades and feedback.
How Students See Their Grades
Students navigate to the Forum and select View grades to see their grades and feedback.
The student will see something similar to the following.
Further information on Whole Forum Grading, and forum grading in general, is provided in the following Bits & Bytes session. It starts at 2 minutes in and transitions into Q&A at 17 minutes. Watching the video at 1.5x speed work well.
More Advanced Forum Grading: Rubric or Marking Guide
Rubric and Marking Guide work similarly in Forum to how they work in the Moodle Assignment Activity, including how they're enabled, so we refer you to those articles: