2 Information for sites upgrading from earlier versions of LMS
3 How to find all courses that are affected
4 Who will see the warning message and button in the gradebook?
5 How can I see what grades will change before I click the button?
Summary
When grading in LMS, either in an activity or directly in the gradebook, you assign the user a score from a specified range. The Grades min max setting controls how the grade will be displayed if the maximum or minimum grades are changed after the user has been graded.
The 2 options are:
1) “Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings” – The user’s grade will be displayed out of the new range and this will affect their percentage.
2) “Initial min and max grades” – The user’s grades are displayed with the range that was defined at the time the user was graded.
Example:
- The assignment is created with the maximum grade of 10
- Sally Student receives a score of 5 out of 10 (50%)
- The assignment maximum grade is changed to 20
If “Min and max grades used in calculation” is set to “Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings”, Sally Student will have a score of 5 out of 20 (25%)
If “Min and max grades used in calculation” is set to “Initial min and max grades”, Sally Student will have a score of 5 out of 10 (50%) until an instructor manually regrades Sally Student out of 20.
Information for sites upgrading from earlier versions of LMS
The default behavior is “Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings”.
In previous LMS versions, the behavior was unintentionally changed to “Initial min and max grades”.
Then, it was restored to “Min and max grades as specified in grade item settings” and this setting was added to allow changing the behavior. Some courses affected by the upgrade will display notices to alert them to the new setting.
How to find all courses that are affected
SELECT * FROM mdl_config WHERE name LIKE 'show_min_max_grades_changed_%' ORDER BY name
That will return rows containing things like “show_min_max_grades_changed_211”. That means that course 211 is affected. So, the URL to get to the gradebook for that course is …/grade/index.php?id=211 within your LMS site. With a bit of clever search-and-replace, you can probably turn the output from the gradebook query into a set of URLs. For example, the following is a more sophisticated version of this query that works well with the Ad-hoc database queries plugin.
SELECT substr(cfg.name, 29) AS Course_id,
course.shortname AS Course_shortname,
CONCAT('%%WWWROOT%%', '/grade/report/grader/index.php', CHR(63), 'id=', substr(cfg.name, 29)) AS Grader_report_url
FROM {config} cfg
JOIN {course} course ON course.id = CAST(substr(name, 29) AS INT)
WHERE name LIKE 'show_min_max_grades_changed_%'
ORDER BY course.shortname
Only users with the lms/grade:manage capability (by default instructor, manager, and admin) will see the warning message and button.
The only way to do this is to have a copy of your live site where you can test. (Testing with a copy of your live site is recommended the good practice.)
In that test copy, you can use the report above to find all course gradebooks that are affected. Then, by using the Grade history report, you can see which grades change when you click the button, and confirm you are happy with the changes before doing the same on your live site.