EdtechGuides: Gradebook guide: Bulk upload grades

About bulk upload grades

This guide will explain how you can bulk upload student grades and student feedback to the Gradebook. Moodle has some feedback management features which are designed to help markers who have large cohorts of students. These enable markers to perform actions in bulk, rather than individually. This feature also allows marking to be completed offline and then uploaded in one go.

Download grade spreadsheet

Select Grades in the contextual navigation menu above the module name.
Select Export from the drop-down menu on the left of the page.
Open the Export as menu. Choose Excel Spreadsheet.
Select the Grade items to be downloaded.
Under Export format options, check Include feedback in export.
- This enables you to provide text feedback as well as a grade.
- The Select all/none button is helpful when managing a large Grader report.
Select Download.

Add grades and feedback to spreadsheet

Open the spreadsheet.
Enter the grades and feedback in the corresponding columns in the spreadsheet.
- Note: If you have already got a marks spreadsheet from the module leader, please ensure that the name lists in these two spreadsheets are identical prior to upload.
Save the spreadsheet as Text (tab delimited).txt file.

Hide grades and feedback for an assignment

You must hide the individual assignment grade item while you are marking to ensure that marks and feedback are released at the same time to all students. To do this:

Select Grades in the contextual navigation menu above the module name. The Grader report page opens
Open the drop-down menu on the left of the page and choose Gradebook setup.

Select the Edit link on the same row as the name of the grade item you are marking.
Select Hide.

In Moodle 3.9, you can access Gradebook Setup by selecting Grader Report from the Module Dashboard or opening the Settings menu and selecting Gradebook Setup.

Select Grades in the contextual navigation menu above the module name.
Select Import from the drop-down menu on the left of the page.
Choose CSV file sub-tab
Browse the Text (tab delimited) file from your computer
For Separator, select Tab
Select Upload grades and you will be taken to the preview and mapping screen.
Identify user by mapping from Email address to Email address.
The grade columns for the assessments display with the title of your assessment and the text (Real). The feedback columns display with the name of the assessment followed by the text (Feedback). Map the spreadsheet columns to the relevant columns using the drop-down menu.
Select Upload grades button.

If you have set a dropdown box to something other than ‘ignore’, it will be overwritten!

All personal information fields, e.g. Surname, ID number, etc., MUST be set to ‘ignore’. If in doubt, contact the Digital Education Team on the IT Self Service Portal.

Select Grades in the contextual navigation menu above the module name..
Select Import from the dropdown menu.
Choose Paste from spreadsheet sub-tab.
From the spreadsheet, select the area which contains the data which you wish to import. Copy and paste in the area marked Data
Select Upload grades and you will be taken to the preview and the mapping screen
Identify user by mapping Email address to user email
Map the grade column in your spreadsheet to the assessment item under the heading grade items in the dropdown list
Map the feedback column in your spreadsheet to the assessment item under the heading comments in the dropdown list
Identify user by mapping Email address to user email
The grade columns for the assessments display with the title of your assessment and the text (Real). The feedback columns display with the name of the assessment followed by the text (Feedback). Map the spreadsheet columns to the relevant columns using the drop-down menu.
Select Upload grades.

If you have set a dropdown box to something other than ‘ignore’, it will be overwritten!

All personal information fields, e.g. Surname, ID number, etc., MUST be set to ‘ignore’. If in doubt, contact the Digital Education Team on the IT Self Service Portal.

Force Import

A column Last downloaded from this course displays the time stamp of the exported date on every exported file.

This prevents grade overriding during the grade importing in a scenario where more than one lecturer exports the course grades and then re-imports them. If a second lecturer exports the grades and tries to import them, the following error message will be displayed and the grade importing procedure will be aborted:

[Student name] grades have not been imported because the grades in the import file are older than in the grader report. To proceed with the grade import anyway, use the force import option.

It will not be possible to import a file that had been an exported file more than a year ago, or one with dates in the future. However, in cases where a lecturer needs to import the grades regardless, they should use the Force import option. This will then import the grades irrespective of the dates.