How do I enter a grade for a student that has partial points like 4.5 out of 5?

If you grade your students in an activity’s grading screen, you can only provide grades in whole numbers. If the assignment is worth 5 points, you can only award 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. You may find yourself wanting to provide partial points/credit, for instance 4.5 out of 5 for an assignment. To give your students a grade that includes partial points, you must manually enter the grade in the gradebook.

Once you have entered a grade in the gradebook manually, you have to continue to update it manually in the gradebook. The gradebook overwrites/supersedes the assignment interface. If you want to revert back to the activity settings and remove the manual, overridden grade from the gradebook, you can follow this FAQ on removing a gradebook override.

  1. Login to Moodle and click on the course for which you wish to enter a partial-point grade.
  2. From the main page of your course, look in your left column (with the purple background). If you do not see your left column, click on the menu icon in the upper left corner (with the three gray lines) to expand the column.
  3. Click on the ‘Grades’ link in the left column.
  4. On the ‘Grader report’ screen, turn on the editing capabilities by clicking the ‘Turn editing on’ button in the upper right corner:
  5. You will know the editing is on when there are boxes for each student for each assignment. You can simply type the partial points grade in the appropriate box.
  6. Make sure you click the ‘Save changes’ button at the bottom when you are done entering grades.
  7. Now the grade item will show you the overall average, and the grades you entered have been saved.