See every grade a Moodle learner earned — across all courses, even after they're unenrolled

Someone from your registrar's office asks a simple-sounding question: "What did this learner score — in everything?"

In Moodle, that is not a one-click answer. The gradebook is built per course: to see a learner's totals you open each course's grade report, one at a time, and copy the numbers into a spreadsheet by hand. If the learner has taken twelve courses, that's twelve screens. And if they were ever unenrolled — expired cohort, finished contract, seasonal cleanup — they won't appear in those grade reports at all, because the live grade rows were deleted the moment they were removed.

We ran into this constantly supporting a busy training platform: current staff, past staff, contractors who'd rolled off, all needing their records pulled for audits and re-certification. Doing it by hand didn't scale. So we wrote a report that answers the question directly — and because tools like this are how we introduce ourselves, we're releasing it free. This post is the honest version: what the gap actually is, how to pull the data yourself with SQL, and where the plugin picks up.

The manual way

Pulling a learner's cross-course grades with SQL

If you just need the answer once and you have database access, you don't need any plugin. This query lists a single learner's course-total grade in every course, reading the live gradebook. The course total is the grade item with itemtype = 'course':

SELECT c.shortname, c.fullname,
       gg.finalgrade, gi.grademax,
       ROUND(100 * gg.finalgrade / NULLIF(gi.grademax,0), 1) AS percent
  FROM mdl_grade_items gi
  JOIN mdl_grade_grades gg ON gg.itemid = gi.id
  JOIN mdl_course c        ON c.id = gi.courseid
 WHERE gi.itemtype = 'course'
   AND gg.userid = ?          -- the learner
   AND gg.finalgrade IS NOT NULL
 ORDER BY c.fullname;

That covers everyone still enrolled. To also catch courses the learner was unenrolled from — where the live row is gone but the value survives in history — union the latest history row per course:

SELECT c.shortname, latest.finalgrade, gi.grademax
  FROM mdl_grade_items gi
  JOIN mdl_course c ON c.id = gi.courseid
  JOIN (
        SELECT ggh.itemid, ggh.finalgrade
          FROM mdl_grade_grades_history ggh
          JOIN (
                SELECT itemid, MAX(timemodified) AS tm
                  FROM mdl_grade_grades_history
                 WHERE userid = ? AND finalgrade IS NOT NULL
                 GROUP BY itemid
               ) newest ON newest.itemid = ggh.itemid
                       AND newest.tm = ggh.timemodified
       ) latest ON latest.itemid = gi.id
 WHERE gi.itemtype = 'course'
   AND gi.id NOT IN (
        SELECT itemid FROM mdl_grade_grades
         WHERE userid = ? AND finalgrade IS NOT NULL
       );

This is genuinely enough for a one-off. But notice what it doesn't give you: a name search (you need the userid already), an item-by-item breakdown, certificates, completion, time-on-task, cohort filtering, or an export your registrar can open. Rebuild all of that by hand every time someone asks, and you've written a report. So we did.

What it does

The whole feature set, plainly

• Find any learner — by name or email, including current, past, and fully unenrolled learners (their grades are recovered from history, so they still appear).
• Filter by course or cohort — search by name or ID (type AML-C12), pick more than one, and add an optional active-time date window.
• Read the summary — for whatever you've filtered to, a strip of tiles shows learner count, average grade (with median and range), completion, certificates, and active time.
• Open a learner — their grade in every course, each expandable to the item-by-item breakdown, plus certificates with verification links.
• Export to Excel — one click produces a workbook: a summary sheet and the full learner list. CSV is available too.

Grades are shown as plain percentages. The report deliberately doesn't colour them pass/fail, because every course sets its own passing mark — a green "82%" would be a lie in a course that requires 90.

Get it

Installing Grade Lookup

It installs like any Moodle plugin, no server shell required:

1. Download the plugin ZIP (link goes on the plugins page as the Moodle Marketplace listing goes live).
2. In Moodle: Site administration → Plugins → Install plugins, upload the ZIP, and install from the ZIP file.
3. Run the upgrade when prompted, then find it under Site administration → Reports → Grade Lookup.

Requirements: Moodle 4.3 or newer. Certificate display uses mod_customcert if you have it, and is skipped cleanly if you don't. As always, try it on a staging site first.

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