LearnDash Gradebook - WordPress Plugin

LearnDash Gradebook Guide: How to Track Grades, Review Progress, and Show Results to Learners

LearnDash Gradebook is not just another box to check on an add-ons list. It solves a practical problem: bringing course grades, quizzes, assignments, and manual evaluations together in one clear gradebook. In this guide, we will walk through installation, the dependencies to verify, where to find the settings after activation, how to plan your grading scale, and how to confirm that instructors, group leaders, and learners all see the correct results.

This guide is written for WordPress site administrators using LearnDash LMS, online course designers, corporate trainers, and training program owners. It does not cover purchasing or license activation. The purpose here is to show how to use the plugin you already have in a real workflow: preparing data, configuring the gradebook, running a practical scenario, troubleshooting issues, and evaluating similar solutions.

Special attention is also given to limitations. A gradebook will not fix a poorly designed course, replace learning analytics, or turn every quiz into a fair certification system. It becomes useful when LearnDash already has a clear structure of courses, quizzes, lessons, topics, assignments, and groups, and your team needs one central screen to monitor outcomes.

What Problem the LearnDash Gradebook Solves

On a typical LearnDash training site, grades are spread across different areas. Quizzes store their own results, assignments require review, lesson progress is tied to content completion, and groups may be used for corporate clients, classes, or cohorts. When you only have a few learners, an administrator can still open individual profiles, courses, or reports and piece the picture together manually. Once you have dozens of groups, multiple instructors, and different completion rules, that approach becomes hard to manage.

LearnDash Gradebook addresses that exact gap. It adds a gradebook layer where learning results can be reviewed in a table format: who is enrolled, which course they are in, what has already been completed, where a grade exists, what still needs manual review, and what the final outcome looks like. For a site owner, this is not just one more admin screen. It is a quality-control tool for the learning process, especially when the site involves live instructors, mentors, or group leaders.

It is important to understand that the plugin works on top of LearnDash LMS. It is not a standalone LMS, it does not create courses from scratch, and it should not be used outside an existing learning structure. Courses, lessons, topics, quizzes, assignments, and users need to exist first. The gradebook then helps turn those results into something easier to review, discuss, and share with participants.

What Becomes Easier After Implementation

The main value of the gradebook shows up in three situations. First, an instructor needs to quickly identify who is falling behind and which submissions are still unreviewed. Second, a group leader needs to see the performance of their own cohort without getting access to the entire site admin area. Third, a learner needs a clear confirmation of progress instead of scattered percentages and separate quiz pages.

In practice, LearnDash Gradebook helps organize tasks like these:

• Reviewing grades by course, group, and user, if that structure is already used in LearnDash.
• Comparing automatically scored quiz results with manually reviewed assignments.
• Flagging items where the result needs instructor attention.
• Giving learners a clearer picture of progress through a report or results page, if that option is enabled in your setup.
• Preparing conversations with learners or corporate clients based on actual learning data rather than guesswork.

For a product SEO page, this leads to one important practical takeaway: LearnDash Gradebook should be treated as a grading management tool, not as a decorative report. It is most useful where grades affect access, certification, pass/fail status, feedback, training payments, or internal oversight.

Where the Gradebook Does Not Replace Other Tools

A gradebook is not the same as an analytics dashboard. If you need advanced reporting on engagement, attendance, time spent in lessons, course revenue performance, or xAPI-based statistics, Gradebook alone may not be enough. In that case, it works well alongside LearnDash reports, ProPanel, or dedicated reporting plugins. The logic is simple: Gradebook handles the grading record, while analytics provides the broader view of behavior and progress.

You should also not expect the plugin to automatically fix weak course design. If quizzes are too easy, assignments have no criteria, and the final grade is not explained to learners, the gradebook will only present that weak methodology more neatly. Before configuring it, define what actually counts as success: a quiz percentage, a manual instructor evaluation, a completed assignment, a final result across multiple modules, or a combination of factors.

Who LearnDash Gradebook Is For and When Another Approach May Be Better

This plugin fits best on sites where LearnDash is used as a real learning system rather than a storefront for a few video lessons. If a course is short, all lessons are unlocked immediately, there are no quizzes, and no final review is needed, the gradebook will likely be unnecessary. But when training involves outcomes, oversight, and feedback, Gradebook becomes a practical team tool.

Good Use Cases

For an online school, the gradebook is helpful when mentors review homework and want to see who has already submitted work, who received a low result, and who needs follow-up. In corporate training, it helps a group leader quickly check whether employees have completed a required course and where certification risks remain. In an academic setting, it works more like a familiar grade sheet: course, participants, grades, final result, comments, and review of disputed cases.

Another strong use case is blended assessment. For example, the final course result may combine an automatically scored quiz, a manually reviewed assignment, and activity across several lessons. Even if the exact grading formula depends on LearnDash settings and Gradebook itself, the administrator still needs a place where those data points can be seen together. Without that, instructors are forced to keep switching between user pages, quiz pages, and assignment screens.

When the Plugin May Be Unnecessary

LearnDash Gradebook may not be the right fit if the site sells short mini-courses with no knowledge checks and the learner only needs a simple "completed" status. It also does not replace a full BI system when a client needs complex reporting by department, job role, region, training time, or external HR systems. In that case, you can keep the gradebook for instructors while moving management reporting into a separate analytics tool.

There is also a technical limitation: the plugin depends on the quality of your LearnDash data. If users are not enrolled in courses, groups are not configured, assignments are not tied to lessons, and quizzes were built without a consistent pass-score policy, the gradebook will not produce a clean picture. Before implementation, it is worth cleaning up the course structure. Otherwise, configuring Gradebook turns into an attempt to fix the consequences of a chaotic setup.

Practical rule: if a course includes graded quizzes, assignments, learner groups, and instructor oversight, a gradebook makes sense. If training is mostly about consuming content, first confirm that you actually have a real grading need.

What to Check Before Installing It on a WordPress Site

Pre-installation preparation matters more than it may seem. Gradebook issues often do not start with the plugin itself, but with missing dependencies, incorrect user roles, or a messy LearnDash structure. Before enabling the add-on, it is worth doing a quick site review.

Core Dependencies

LearnDash LMS should already be installed and configured on the site. Courses should be published, not sitting in draft status. Users should be enrolled in courses directly, through groups, through purchases, through memberships, or through another confirmed enrollment method. If a group needs to see its own results separately, verify that learners are actually assigned to the correct group and that the group leader has the right role and access level.

Review quizzes and assignments separately. For quizzes, pay attention to pass scores, attempt limits, result saving, and course association. For assignments, confirm whether submissions are enabled, who reviews them, and how the result is recorded. If homework is used only as a file upload with no real grading, the gradebook may show an incomplete picture.

Roles and Permissions

The most common organizational risk is giving overly broad access to someone who only needs to see the performance of their own group. LearnDash uses roles and contexts tied to administrators, group leaders, instructors, and learners. Before installing Gradebook, decide who will actually work with it:

• Site administrator - responsible for installation, compatibility, general settings, and backup.
• Instructional designer or instructor - reviews grades, assignments, and disputed results.
• Group leader - views progress only for their own group, if the site uses LearnDash groups.
• Learner - sees a personal report, if that view is enabled and relevant to your training process.

Do not enable public grade displays until you clearly understand who can access them. Learning results should be treated as personal data in a broad practical sense, even if the site does not formally store excessive information. A permissions mistake can show one learner someone else’s record or give a group leader more information than they should have.

Backup and Staging Environment

Before installing the add-on on a live site, create a backup of both files and the database. On a learning site, the database is especially important because it stores progress records, quiz attempts, assignments, and user relationships. If you have a staging copy, test Gradebook there first. That will show how the table is built, whether it conflicts with the theme, and whether the courses contain enough data to produce a meaningful display.

Installation and Initial Validation After Activation

The overall installation process is standard for a WordPress plugin. The administrator uploads the ZIP package through the Plugins section, installs it, clicks Activate, and checks whether a new section, menu item, or settings area related to Gradebook appears. The exact menu path may vary depending on your LearnDash version, active add-ons, and site configuration, so use LearnDash, Gradebook, and gradebook settings labels as your guide.

After activation, do not rush to open the learner-facing site. Start in the admin area and make sure the plugin is not showing any LearnDash dependency warnings. Then open one course that already has real users, quizzes, and assignments. If the gradebook looks empty, that is not always an error. The selected course may simply have no completed attempts yet, users may not be enrolled, or a filter may be hiding the relevant data.

Minimum Installation Test

For the first validation, one control course is enough. Pick a course that has one quiz and one assignment. Create or use a test learner account, enroll it in the course, complete part of the lessons, submit the assignment, and finish the quiz. Then return to the gradebook and check whether the user appears, whether the course is visible, whether the quiz attempt is shown, and whether there is a place for a manual assignment grade.

1. Make sure LearnDash LMS is active and the course is published.
2. Confirm that the test user is enrolled in the course or belongs to the correct group.
3. Take the quiz as the learner and save the result.
4. Submit the assignment if the course uses manual review.
5. Open the gradebook and confirm that the result can be found through the course, group, or user filter.

This test is more useful than simply checking whether "the page opens." It validates the full chain: LearnDash created the data, Gradebook detected it, the instructor can find the result, and the learner did not lose progress. If that chain breaks, further configuration does not make sense until the cause is identified.

What Not to Do Right After Activation

Do not change too many settings at once. If you enable a public report, change the grading scale, add new roles, hide columns, and rebuild the course all on the same day, diagnosing an issue will be difficult. Start with one course and one assessment type. Once the basic setup works, then add groups, manual assignments, user-facing views, and additional rules.

You should also avoid testing only as an administrator instead of as a learner. A WordPress administrator often sees more than a normal user, so that does not reflect the real learner experience. Use a dedicated learner account for testing, and a separate group leader account if groups are part of the scenario.

Post-Installation Configuration: Turning a Table Into a Useful Grade Record

After installation, the real goal is not just to open a table, but to make it useful for a specific team. A good gradebook answers practical questions: whose results to review, for which course, which result counts as final, what data the learner should see, who can edit a grade, and how to spot a problem quickly.

Selecting the Course, Group, and Review Scope

Start with the review scope. If the site has only one course, the gradebook can stay simple. If there are many courses, filters by course, group, and user become important. In corporate training, teams often choose a group first, then a course inside that group, then review the participants. In an open online school, it is often more practical to start from the course and move to the learners, because groups may not reflect the actual training cohorts.

Do not mix different audience types in a single review workflow. For example, if you have both individual customers and corporate groups, configure review separately for each scenario. They have different needs: an individual learner cares about personal progress, while a corporate manager cares about group status and at-risk participants.

Columns and Graded Items

The gradebook should show only the items your team actually uses to make decisions. If you add every quiz, assignment, lesson, and system status, the table becomes too wide and hard to read. First define the key course elements: diagnostic quiz, required assignments, final quiz, final project, certificate, or completion module. Secondary activities can remain inside LearnDash without being displayed in the main record if they make the table harder to use.

A practical rule is that each column should answer one question. "Passed the final quiz?" "Submitted the assignment?" "Needs manual review?" "Eligible for the certificate?" If a column does not help answer a teaching or management question, it is better to remove it from the working view or move it into a secondary report.

Grading Scale and Manual Adjustments

LearnDash often uses percentages, points, completion statuses, and manual marks. Gradebook helps present them more clearly, but the administrator should agree on the rules in advance. For example, a quiz percentage may be the technical score, while the final course grade may be an instructional decision made by the instructor. If manual adjustments are allowed, they need a clear policy: who can change a grade, why, where the reason is recorded, and how the learner is informed about the change.

Do not use manual overrides to hide course design problems. If multiple learners are getting incorrect results at scale, the real cause needs to be found in the quiz, attempt settings, pass threshold, or assignment-to-course relationship. Manual editing makes sense for one-off cases: a re-review of work, an appeal, an individual assignment, or a result carried over after a technical failure.

Learner Report

If your Gradebook setup includes a front-end learner report, enable it only after verifying access permissions. A personal report should show learners their own progress and grades, not the instructor’s internal grade record. A good report answers three questions: what has already been credited, what still requires action, and what the current final result is.

For the report page, use clear context: a short introduction, the report content itself, an explanation of the grading scale, and a contact path for disputed cases. Avoid placing sales blocks, distracting banners, or unnecessary widgets nearby. The learner came to check a result, not to navigate a page crowded with marketing elements.

How to Connect Quizzes, Assignments, and the Final Grade

The most important part of working with the gradebook is understanding where the grade comes from. In LearnDash, a result may come from a quiz, a submitted assignment, a completed lesson, a manual review, or a combination of elements. If those sources are not clearly separated, the instructor will see numbers without understanding why the final result looks the way it does.

Automatically Scored Quizzes

Quizzes are useful for quick knowledge checks, but they need to be set up correctly. Define the pass score, review the attempts, questions, point allocation, and course relationship. If one quiz is meant for practice and another for final assessment, do not mix them in the gradebook without clarification. Otherwise, the learner may assume that the practice score affects the final evaluation.

Transparency matters for the final quiz. In the course description or next to the report, explain what result counts as sufficient. If the gradebook shows a percentage while the instructional team talks about a "pass," those concepts need to be connected. For example, a score above the threshold may count as a pass, while a score below it may require a retake or a manual consultation.

Assignments With Manual Review

Assignments provide more flexibility, but they require discipline. The instructor needs to know where to find new submissions, how to assign a grade, and how to communicate the result to the learner. If an assignment is required, it should appear in the record as a separate item. If it is only for practice, it should not be mixed into the final grade.

A good practice is to define review criteria before the course begins. Even brief criteria help: completeness of the response, alignment with the task, practical application, formatting, and correction of prior feedback. That way, a manual grade in Gradebook becomes the result of a clear process instead of a subjective number.

Final Course Result

The final grade should be predictable. If it is based on multiple elements, explain that in the course content and verify that the gradebook displays all required sources. You do not need a complicated formula. Sometimes three conditions are enough: complete all required lessons, pass the final quiz, and receive credit for the project. What matters is that the instructor and the learner understand the rules the same way.

If the gradebook allows a manual final mark, use it carefully. It is convenient for an instructor’s final decision, but it can confuse the team if it contradicts automatically recorded data. In disputed cases, document the reason for the change in an internal comment, a support task, or your formal learning policy.

Practical Scenario: Corporate Training With Groups and a Final Review

Consider a concrete example. A company runs required training on internal policies. A course has been created in LearnDash, employees are enrolled through groups, each group has a leader, and the final result includes a quiz and a short assignment. The goal is to give the leader a clear overview, the instructor a review queue, and the learner a personal confirmation of the result.

Scenario Goal

You need a grade record that shows which employees completed the course, who has not finished the quiz, whose assignment is waiting for review, and who is ready for final credit. You also need a personal learner screen where each person can see their own status without access to coworkers’ data.

Preparation

Before configuration, make sure the course is published, employees are placed in the correct LearnDash group, the quiz is tied to the course, the assignment is created in the proper lesson or topic, and the group leader has access only to their own group. Create a test employee account and a test group leader account so you can verify different roles.

Setup Steps

1. Open the gradebook and select the corporate training course.
2. Filter participants by group so different departments are not mixed together.
3. Keep only the required items in the working view: the final quiz, the assignment, and the final status.
4. Verify that the test employee appears in the list after enrollment.
5. Take the quiz as the employee and make sure the result appears in the gradebook.
6. Submit the assignment and check whether the instructor can see that manual review is required.
7. Enter a grade or pass mark for the assignment and see whether the final status changes.
8. Open the learner’s personal report, if you use it, and confirm that it shows only that learner’s own data.

Result Validation

After setup, you should be able to distinguish four states: the employee has not started the course, the employee is in progress, the employee is waiting for assignment review, and the employee has completed the course and received credit. If the gradebook shows only quiz percentages but does not help distinguish "waiting for review" from "did not pass," the configuration is incomplete. In that case, revisit which items are displayed in the record and how manual review is recorded.

Test the scenario under different roles. The administrator should see everything. The instructor should see the relevant courses and work items. The group leader should see only their own group if that model is in use. The learner should see only personal data, with no access to others’ results. The main sign of a successful setup is that each participant sees exactly the level of information required for their task.

A Detail People Often Miss

In corporate training, managers often want to export a list of people who have not completed the course. If your version of Gradebook includes a usable filter or export option, use it after validating the data. If it does not, do not replace the gradebook with manual copying from multiple screens. It is better to agree in advance on which screen is the source of truth rather than maintain parallel spreadsheets that quickly drift away from LearnDash.

Validating Results: How to Tell Whether the Gradebook Is Working Properly

Result validation is not something you do only once after installation. It should be repeated after course changes, after adding a group, after a LearnDash update, after switching themes, or after enabling a new plugin that affects roles, dashboards, caching, or content display. The gradebook works with learning data, so a small mistake in permissions or filters can look like a serious loss of results.

Data Verification Chain

Use the chain "learner - course - action - gradebook - report." First, the learner must be enrolled in the course. Then the learner performs an action: completes a quiz, submits an assignment, or finishes a lesson. Next, the administrator or instructor should see that action in the gradebook. Finally, the learner should see the expected result in their personal report, if that report is enabled.

If any link in that chain fails, do not jump straight to reinstalling the plugin. Break the problem down:

• If the learner cannot see the course, check course enrollment and group membership.
• If the course is visible but the quiz result does not appear, check the quiz settings and whether the attempt was saved.
• If the assignment was submitted but the instructor cannot see it, check the assignment-to-lesson relationship and the reviewer’s permissions.
• If the administrator sees the data but the group leader does not, check the role and whether learners are assigned to the correct group.
• If everything looks correct in the admin area but the public report is empty, check the report page, shortcode or output block, cache, and user permissions.

Front-End Interface Validation

If the report is displayed on a public-facing site page, open it in a normal browser window while logged in as a test learner. Do not rely only on the administrator preview. Make sure the table fits on a mobile screen, long course titles do not break the layout, grade colors remain readable, and there is a clear explanation of the grading scale nearby.

If the site theme heavily styles tables, buttons, or the learner dashboard, the report may look different from what you expect. In that case, start with a page that contains as few extra elements as possible, and add styling only afterward. Any CSS adjustments should go into a child theme or a safe custom CSS mechanism, not into LearnDash or Gradebook files.

Change Log Inside the Team

When multiple people are allowed to edit grades, you need a simple internal policy. Who enters a manual grade? Who changes a disputed result? Where is the reason documented? How does the learner know the work has been reviewed? These questions are not always solved by plugin settings alone. Sometimes a basic internal rule is enough: only the responsible instructor changes a grade, and disputed cases are documented in the assignment comment or support system.

That kind of policy protects you from a situation where the gradebook works technically, but the team does not trust the data. For a learning project, trust in the grade can be almost as important as the grade itself.

Common LearnDash Gradebook Issues and Troubleshooting

It is best to troubleshoot gradebook problems by symptom. There is no need to immediately disable every plugin or rebuild the course. First identify exactly what does not match your expectations: an empty table, the wrong user, a missing quiz, group leader permissions, the public report, or the visual layout.

The Gradebook Is Empty or Does Not Show the Right Learners

Symptom: the administrator opens the gradebook but does not see the course or group participants. Possible causes include users not being enrolled in the course, the wrong group being selected, the course being in draft status, a filter hiding users with no results, or the test user not having performed any graded action yet.

Check the user’s course enrollment in LearnDash, their group membership, and whether they have completed at least one action. Then reset the gradebook filters and select the course again. If the data appears, the problem was not the plugin but the selected view scope. If the data still does not appear, check whether LearnDash itself can see that user’s progress outside Gradebook.

The Quiz Grade Does Not Appear in the Record

Symptom: the learner completed the quiz, but the gradebook shows no result or still displays an old one. Possible causes include the quiz not being tied to the correct course, the attempt not being completed, the learner using a practice quiz, the result being hidden by filters, or a delay caused by admin-side or report-page caching.

Check the quiz page in LearnDash, the number of attempts, completion status, and course association. Then complete a fresh test attempt using a normal learner account. If the result appears only after a page refresh or cache purge, exclude the personal report page and LearnDash dynamic data from aggressive caching.

The Group Leader Sees the Wrong Learners

Symptom: the group leader sees an empty grade record, someone else’s group, or a user list that is too broad. This issue is almost always related to LearnDash groups, roles, and assignments. Check which group the leader is tied to, whether the learners belong to that group, and whether the site uses an additional role plugin that changes user capabilities.

Start the fix with a test group. Create one learner and one leader, assign both to only one group, and test the gradebook. If the minimal scenario works, the problem is in the real group structure. If it does not, check for role conflicts and compatibility issues with access-management plugins.

The Learner’s Public Report Shows a Blank Page

Symptom: the personal grades page opens, but no data is shown. Possible causes include the learner not being logged in, the page missing the correct output block or shortcode, the user not being enrolled in the course, access permissions hiding the report, or the page being cached as a shared page for all visitors.

Check the page while logged in as a test learner, not as an administrator. Make sure the user is signed in, the course is available, and the page is not being served from a public cache. If you use a caching plugin, exclude the dashboard, report page, and LearnDash dynamic elements from full-page caching.

The Table Looks Broken on Mobile

Symptom: columns run off the screen, long quiz names break the page, or buttons overlap. The cause is often the WordPress theme or site-wide CSS not being designed for wide tables. The gradebook itself may be outputting correct data, while the surrounding site layer makes it hard to use.

First reduce the number of displayed columns and see whether the report can be split by course, group, or time period. Then inspect the theme CSS. Do not edit plugin files. If a targeted adjustment is needed, add it in the child theme or in safe custom CSS after confirming the actual classes in the browser.

The Layout Changed or Data Disappeared After an Update

Symptom: after updating LearnDash, the theme, or another add-on, the gradebook behaves differently. Start with a control course and a test learner. Check whether the data still exists inside LearnDash itself. If LearnDash can see the progress but Gradebook cannot, look for a conflict or an integration change. If LearnDash also cannot see the data, the issue goes deeper and is not specific to the gradebook.

When to roll back a change: if enabling a new option or plugin changes grade-related access permissions, it is better to temporarily undo that change and return to the last known working setup. Loss of privacy around learning results matters more than cosmetic configuration changes.

Safe Improvements Without Editing Plugin Files

On LearnDash sites, there is often a temptation to "quickly fix" the gradebook display directly in the plugin files. That is not a good idea. Any update can overwrite your changes, and troubleshooting becomes harder. The safer path is to use plugin and LearnDash settings, a child theme, custom CSS, WordPress roles, and a clear team process.

Improving the Personal Report Page

If learners are shown a personal report, surround it with useful context. Add a short explanation of the grading scale before the report, and add instructions after it explaining what to do if a grade is disputed. This can be done with regular WordPress page content, without touching Gradebook code. That approach is especially important when the course uses not just percentages, but also manual review.

For example, the text next to the report can explain that the final mark is updated after instructor review, while the quiz result appears immediately after the attempt is completed. This reduces support questions and helps learners avoid confusing an automatic score with the final decision.

Compatibility With Caching and the Learner Dashboard

Pages that display personal learning data should not be cached like standard public articles. If page caching is enabled, exclude the learner dashboard, the learner gradebook page, and other dynamic LearnDash areas. There is no need to disable all site caching. It is enough to exclude the pages where output depends on the current user.

The check is simple: sign in as one test learner and open the report, then sign out and sign in as another. If the second learner sees someone else’s result or an outdated page, the cache is configured dangerously. In that case, purge the cache, add exclusions, and test again.

Consistent Terminology

On a Russian-language site, it is important to name results consistently. Do not mix terms like "score," "percentage," "grade," "pass," "status," and "final result" if they mean different things. A short legend next to the report works well: percentage means quiz result, pass means assignment decision, final result means course status. This requires no code, but it noticeably improves clarity.

If the Gradebook interface remains in English, do not translate system labels directly in the plugin files unless there is a real reason to do so. First check whether the site supports standard WordPress language files or safe string-translation tools. Directly editing extension files is a last resort and is usually unnecessary for normal operation.

When LearnDash Gradebook Is the Right Choice

LearnDash Gradebook makes sense when the site contains more than just learning materials and instead supports a real, reviewable learning process. Courses should include graded elements, learners should be enrolled through a clear method, instructors should understand the review rules, and group leaders should see only their own data. In that kind of system, the gradebook becomes the operational center of assessment.

Before full implementation, start small: one course, one quiz, one assignment, one test learner, and one group. Validate the chain from learner action to the gradebook row and the personal report. Then expand the setup to real courses. That takes less time than trying to enable the gradebook across the whole site at once and then figuring out why part of the data looks inconsistent.

If, after testing, you see that the gradebook solves your main problem, you can download LearnDash Gradebook and test it on a site copy or on a controlled course. The most important thing is to evaluate not just whether a table exists, but the quality of the entire workflow: who can see the data, where the grade comes from, how disputed results are reviewed, and whether the learner understands what to do next.

On a strong learning site, a gradebook is not a polished final layer. It is part of the teaching method. It helps reveal the result, but that result still needs to be designed in advance through the course, quizzes, assignments, and review rules.