Using Excel for Grades in Moodle

Doing all of your grades in the Moodle Gradebook isn’t for everyone. But you can use Excel and still get the benefits of the Moodle Gradebook.

If you like doing grading in Excel, but want students to be able to see their grades or want Moodle to do some grading for your course you can use an Excel spreadsheet and import the grades into Moodle.

The first step is to set up your Gradebook in Moodle, including your manual grade items. Setting it up this way will let you download an Excel spreadsheet from Moodle, it will already have columns for all of your course activities and rows for all the students in your course.

Here’s our demo gradebook, all our items are already set up

Just make sure that you don’t download this Excel file too early in your course because you might miss out on some of the students who enrol in the course after the course’s start date.

After you’ve got your gradebook built, you can select to Export an Excel Spreadsheet.

Now you’ll be given some options of the things you’d like to download into the spreadsheet. Because importing into Moodle will overwrite older grades, I recommend pressing the Select None option and then checking the boxes for only the activities you will be grading in Excel.

Here I’ve pressed select none, so there are no checkboxes checked yet.

Downloading the columns for things like category totals, the course total, or activities that are graded on Moodle can really create some problems when you go to import, so I suggest avoiding those problems in the first place. If you do download those columns it isn’t the end of the world, and we’ll go over avoiding those issues on the import soon.

Next press the button to download your Excel spreadsheet.

Now you can do your grading in the Excel spreadsheet

Whenever you are saving the file to import it into the Moodle gradebook, you want to save it as a .CSV file.

Once you saved your .CSV, go to your Moodle Gradebook and choose to import a .CSV file

You’ll be asked about some formatting next, but all the settings should be fine. Just press the Upload grades button to continue.

The next screen you will see will be Moodle trying to figure out what information is in your Excel file. The first thing that we have to do is set how Moodle figures out which row belongs to which student. I tell Moodle to map from Email address and to Map to useremail. There are probably students in your course with the same first name or surname, but their emails should all be unique.

After that, it’s time to match our columns with the grade items. For most sections I tell Moodle to Ignore. But for the items where I’ve graded marks in Excel I choose the matching gradebook activity from the dropdown.

Once again make sure that you aren’t mapping any items that you’re grading in Moodle here, otherwise those grades will be overridden. When you’re done press Upload grades. You should get a screen like this:

After you press continue, you’ll be taken to the Gradebook. Double check your grades to make sure they show up correctly.

If you have any questions about this, or need help setting up your Excel file, or importing it to Moodle contact us at elearning@upei.ca.