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Reduced weight for all questions in an assignment (LTI course grade mode)

Reduced weight for all questions in an assignment (LTI course grade mode)

by Sean Fitzpatrick -
Number of replies: 2
We're using LTI integration between WeBWorK and Moodle, with course grade mode as the default grade passback, which most courses are using.

As far as I can tell, the grade assigned is the total number of questions correct, divided by the total number of questions, over all homework sets.

The downside of this is that if a homework set has more problems than usual, it ends up with higher weight. I started with a review set containing 24 questions (twice as many as the usual 12, but most were simple).

I'd like these to all have weight 0.5 so that this homework set has weight 12, the same as the other sets, but weights can only be set relative to other problems *in that set* -- if everything is set to 0.5, it's going to reset to weight 1 as soon as you save changes.

Is there any way to make one homework set contribute less to the total than the others? Of course I can switch to homework grade mode for LTI, but in the past students have found this confusing -- they always end up using the wrong link and can't figure out why they're not authenticated correctly.
In reply to Sean Fitzpatrick

Re: Reduced weight for all questions in an assignment (LTI course grade mode)

by Danny Glin -
As of right now, this is the way it is.

The course-level LTI grade passback is only programmed to do a raw total as you describe. The weights for each question are stored as integers, so you can't set a weight to 0.5.

One workaround is to set the weight of each question in the subsequent sets to 2, so that all of your assignments are out of 24.

Having some options on how the course-level LTI grade is calculated is a feature I would also like to see (e.g. weighting sets differently, excluding sets, possibly even dropping the lowest score(s)). This would be something to look at for the next version of WW.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Reduced weight for all questions in an assignment (LTI course grade mode)

by Sean Fitzpatrick -
OK, great - thanks! That explains why the changes wouldn't save.
Of course now I'll have to remember to change the weights on all future sets, but this solves the problem. Edit: I tracked down the line I need to add to my course.conf to set the default to 2 :-)

I'd also like to see the features you suggest. All of these are possible on the LMS side, but then the homework grade mode is necessary, which, as I mentioned, some students find overly complicated.

I used homework grade mode last year for exactly this reason: I didn't want to count the review assignment, and I wanted to let them drop their lowest score. But I had enough tech support emails from students to convince me to switch to the course grade mode this time around.