How do I drop the lowest grade or grades?

There are times when you may want to drop the lowest grade in a set of activities. Be it assignments, quizzes, manual grade items, or any other grade activities, you can have Moodle automatically drop the lowest grade or grades in any category in the gradebook. You can also enable this ‘drop the lowest grade(s)’ feature for the entire gradebook.

To set up your gradebook to drop the lowest grade or grades, follow these steps below.

  1. Login to Moodle and enter the course in which you wish to drop the lowest grade or grades.
  2. From the main page of the course, click on the gray, ‘Edit’ gear wheel in the upper right corner.
  3. From the drop-down menu that appears, click on the “Gradebook setup” option.
  4. On the “Gradebook setup” page, you must determine which items will be contained in the set of which one will be dropped. Are you dropping one assignment? Two quizzes? Lowest grade in the entire course?
  5. For this example, we will drop one of the ‘Direct grading’ assignment examples. Click on the ‘Edit’ drop-down for the category and select ‘Edit settings’ from the drop-down option.
  6. Then in the ‘Grade category’ section, click the ‘Show more…’ link.
  7. At this point, you will see a setting titled, ‘Drop the lowest.’ Put the number of grades that you wish to drop in the box. So if you wish the system to simply drop the lowest, you would place a ‘1’ in the box. If you would like the system to drop the two lowest grades, you would place a ‘2.’
    Scroll down and click the ‘Save changes’ button.
  8. Back on the ‘Gradebook setup’ page, the category will now indicate that the lowest value is being dropped.

NOTE: You can only drop the lowest value in the following aggregations with the following situations:

  • Mean of Grades, at all times
  • Weighted Mean of Grades, only if all of the items in the category carry the same assigned weight
  • Natural & Simple Weighted Mean of Grades, if all of the items in the category are worth the same number of points.If the items are not the same point value, the ‘Drop the lowest’ setting will be grayed out/disabled.