9 Tools or Plugins for Better Grading in Moodle 2021
Is grading in Moodle stressing you out?
We get it! Grading in Moodle can take away a huge chunk of your productive hours.
But as much as you hate it, it’s a part of your job! And also a necessary evil! Simply because it influences your course content, your teaching style, and even helps you gauge the impact of your teaching methods on your students.
We know the pressure is real!
As responsible teachers, you devote countless hours in grading your students in Moodle. You might think that brings you nothing but frustration and oodles of stress, especially as the deadlines get closer.
But you know what? There is HOPE! We are about to give you the solution.
So, keep reading.
A Step Towards Better Grading in Moodle
There’s something for everyone in Moodle. When it comes to grading, several tools in Moodle can make your lives easier.
No need to be overwhelmed! Certain tools and plugins in Moodle can come in really handy to get you organized and help you streamline your grading work.
So, let’s make your job less stressful with a better grading process in place.
In this article, you will find simple yet effective tools to help you do better grading in Moodle.
List of Best Plugins to Improve your Grading in Moodle
#1 Edwiser RapidGrader
Grading in Moodle can be tedious and can gradually lead to burnout. Thankfully, you can quicken your grading work with Edwiser RapidGrader. It’s a smart quiz grading plugin equipped with a nifty single-screen grader.
The plugin helps you drastically cut down on hours spent on grading in Moodle. It gives you the flexibility to grade all the questions of a single student at a time (user-based grading) or grade the same question of multiple students (question-based grading) in a single window.
Edwiser RapidGrader even makes tracking learner progress super-convenient by giving you a graphical overview of the performance of your students.
You can also sort and grade a specific category of questions if needed. Also, keeping track of all graded and non-graded quizzes is simpler with a user-friendly toggle bar that shows the grading status of those quizzes.
Apart from that, Edwiser RapidGrader lets you grade faster in the language of your choice and also works seamlessly with whichever theme for Moodle you prefer to set on your Moodle site.
#2 Team Assignment
Team Assignment allows students to group themselves into teams of one to four students and make a single submission. You can grade the submission and even post grades and comments to individual students in the group.
A team submission can contain multiple files for you to grade. The best part is that this plugin gives you the flexibility to grade the whole team or grade individual members of the team.
Note – It does not support the rubrics grading method
#3 Turnitin Plagiarism Plugin
To prevent students from stealing answers in crucial learning assessments, it makes sense to use the Turnitin Plagiarism plugin. It’s a paid plagiarism detection system integrated with Moodle that checks for originality in assignment submissions of students against sources on the internet and a wide number of databases.
The plugin is integrated with Moodle’s current Assignment module. You can use the Turnitin Plagiarism Plugin to evaluate the authenticity of the coursework of students for formative and summative assessments.
If you are facing the issue where students are copying their homework without putting any effort to learn, this plugin can be an ideal pick.
#4 Grade Reviews
The Grade Reviews plugin is exactly the same as the core submission comments plugin with one major difference. In this case, certain users are able to view or delete comments. You as a teacher can review the grading done by another teacher/tutor.
You can also insert comments for the previous grading teacher to see but these comments are not visible to the students. You also have permission to delete the comments.
The plugin was designed in response to the requirements of a reviewed marking process in certain universities. This reviews the grading system by adding an additional level of moderation in grading, pretty much like second marking the work by a different tutor/teacher.
Once a piece of work has been graded, grade reviewers enter comments about the submission such as the content, grade, and comments of the main/previous grader. These comments are only visible to the original marker and Moodle managers.
#5 PDF Submission
PDF Submission lets you annotate and return PDF files submitted by students. With this plugin, you can easily point out minute details and mark PDF documents by adding relevant comments, drawing lines, ovals, stamps, rectangles, highlights, and several other tools on the student’s work.
This plugin is super-convenient for evaluating PDF documents as you can assess them from the browser itself.
Moreover, you can view the past comments made on a student’s previous submissions by choosing that submission from the ‘compare to’ list. Once you save the draft and generate the response, your students will be able to view all your annotations. Evaluating your PDF submissions cannot get easier than this.
#6 Grade Me
The Grade Me plugin is another convenient tool to ease grading in Moodle. It displays the list of all the submitted assignments, essays, file responses, etc that are yet to be graded.
The plugin is configured to work with groups. Access to the assignments submitted by the students depends on whether you and the concerned students are members of the same group. So, you will only be able to view the assignments submitted by students if you both belong to the same group.
Grade Me is quite flexible as you can decide where to add the plugin in your Moodle site depending on your needs. This way you can easily control the amount of pending grading work that you want to see.
For instance, if the plugin is installed on the site homepage or your user dashboard page, you will be able to view all the ungraded assignments for ALL courses in one place. But if you put the block on a course page it will only show the ungraded assignments for that course.
Moreover, you can also configure the block in such a way so that it displays site-wide on all pages.
#7 Gradebook
Gradebook is an absolute must-have and the most popular tool among Moodlers. It helps you keep all your grades well-organized and updated from a wide range of gradable activities.
Moodle populates the Gradebook with scores from different graded items (Quiz, forum, glossary, SCORM, etc) set up in different parts of your course across the site.
When you create a gradable activity within your course, the Gradebook automatically a grade item to record the grades of the newly created activity. As you or the system evaluate and assign marks within the completed activity, the assigned grades are automatically updated in the Gradebook.
Gradebook makes things pretty convenient as you can easily view and edit scores, add specific weightings to grades, import grades of offline assessments (grades can also be entered manually), and even organize grade items into different grade categories. A grade category has its own aggregated grade which is calculated from its grade items.
#8 Whole Forum Grading
This feature was introduced as part of the latest release of Moodle version 3.8 to improve the usability of Moodle Forums and to grade effective forum participation.
This plugin helps you to rate-as-you-go and simplifies grading forums for you. With Whole Forum Grading, you need not put extra effort into recalling a student’s work at the end of the week.
Apart from piggybacking the rating tasks while you read them, your students will be able to see their forum posts rated as they go – a great way to give them immediate feedback.
You can grade students on the basis of their posts in a forum by setting up whole forum grading in the forum. Before the update, Forums could not be graded. They only supported the rating option which if enabled, allowed you to rate the forum posts of students.
Once activated, you can easily view students’ history of posts on a forum, and mark it using a numerical point grade or a grading scale. You can turn on the forum grading interface to view all of a student’s posts for review and to assign a grade.
What’s great is that you can also use different grading methods such as marking guides and rubrics based on your preferences and grading objectives. In case you need more information, here’s a quick and easy step-by-step guide to set up Whole Forum Grading in your Moodle e-Learning program
#9 Workshop
The Workshop is a powerful peer assessment activity that can help you drastically reduce your grading stress in Moodle.
With the Workshop activity, you can specify a grading scale for assessments. Your students can then add and distribute submissions amongst their peers for assessment based on the grading scale you define, the instructions you give, and any additional criteria you set.
You can even monitor their progress by looking at the grades listed in the Workshop Grades Report.
The Workshop activity allows you to have great control over individual or group submissions and allowed file types. You can also recalculate or change grades multiple times if required. The activity even helps you display selected submissions to students to assist with peer assessment.
Advanced Grading in Moodle
Last but not least, you can also utilize the advanced grading options in Moodle to further refine and improve your grading process in Moodle. Some of them are LAe-R – Learning Analytics Enriched Rubric, BTEC Marking, and Multiple graders
Final Words
These are some plugins to make sure you don’t feel overburdened with the grading work in Moodle.
But every use case is unique. Your choice of grading tools in Moodle depends on several factors such as your learning/training objectives, your method of course delivery, and the preferences of your students. You need to keep these parameters in mind to make sure your grading load does not take a toll on you.
James Joyce says, “Mistakes are the portals of discovery”.
Despite doing everything correctly, if your grading work continues to trouble you. There might be some grading mistakes you are making unknowingly. Take a look and re-evaluate! In order to build a holistic grading mechanism for your Moodle site, you need to take ownership of your mistakes and learn from them.
To further give your grading process a boost, you can also read through these proven grading strategies to improve your grading work in Moodle.
We hope you found this article useful. Which tools do you prefer for smooth and effective grading in Moodle?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
