Grading students on core competencies

Often as educators we need to grade assignments on core competencies, otherwise known as key skills or goals. That certainly applies to my syllabus: a percentage of the final grade for my course includes marks for numeracy, literacy, and the use of ICT. Because we are converting to Moodle, and in Moodle-speak the competencies that I am grading are called "outcomes", in this final section we learn how to specify the core competencies we need to grade, and how we can then grade students on them. There are pros and cons of converting to Moodle, specifically: I can choose to enable outcomes on a per assignment basis, but you can't use the default numeric grading scale to grade outcomes, only standard and custom grading scales (such as my custom Backyard Ballistics scale that I created in Time for action – Creating a custom grade scale.

Configuring outcomes

Let's start by seeing how easy it is to specify learning outcomes for an assignment.