The Forum activity allows you to 'rate' individual forum discussion posts. These ratings are added to Grades for the purposes of summative and formative assessment.

By default, only lecturers can rate forum posts.

To learn how to add a Forum, refer to How to set up a Forum.

To enable ratings:

1. Access Forum settings and navigate down to 'Ratings'.
2. Select the 'Aggregate type' from the dropdown menu.
3. Select the type of grading. If you select 'Scale', then a number of options will be made available to you. If you select 'Point' grading you can then enter the maximum grade available for this activity.
   Optional: restrict which posts are able for grading according to the time they were posted ('From' and 'To').
4. Select  'Save and return to unit'.

Aggregate types

The options available to you are:

• Average of ratings - The mean of all the ratings given to a student's posts within a Forum.
• Count of ratings - The number of rated items becomes the final grade.
  NOTE: The total cannot exceed the maximum grade for the activity.
• Maximum - The highest rating given to any one post will be assigned as the final grade given for the assignment.
• Minimum - The lowest rating given to any one post will be assigned as the final grade given for the assignment within the Gradebook.
• Sum - All ratings which have been given to all individual posts are added together.
  NOTE: The total cannot exceed the maximim grade for this activity.

If ‘No ratings’ is selected the activity will not appear in the Gradebook. If you are using your Forum for the purposes of communicating with your students, it is advised that you select 'No ratings' from the options provided.

If you choose a rating then you will be asked to select a scale. Point grading allows you to enter the maximum grade available, while scales are used by units, for example the ACUcom competency scales.