Awarding Bonus Points

To easily award extra credit points, the simplest way is to create a Grade Item in an Extra Credit category.

To do so:

Go into your gradebook
Click the "Setup" tab at the top

Before going any further, check to ensure your course total is correct.

Next, at the bottom of the page, click "Add category." We are going to create a category to house all of your extra credits.
Give the category a name like "Extra Credit" and make sure the Aggregation is set to "Natural" using the dropdown menu.Then save changes.

Next, go back to the bottom of that page, and click "Add grade item"

Give it a name, such as "Exam Extra Credit" or "Discussion Bonus Points" and enter a Max grade of points available (by default, this is set to 100.00). For the "Parent category" use the dropdown menu and select the "Extra Credit" category you created earlier.

Then click "Save changes."

You can see from the image below that our course total has increased by 10. This isn't what we want. To fix this, click "Edit settings" for the Extra Credit category.
Then expand the "Parent category" folder, and tick the "Extra credit" box. Then save changes.

You should see that your Course Total has returned to normal. Next to the Extra Credit category total, you should also see a +/- next to the total point value, designating this is an extra credit category.

You may enter as many Extra Credit items into this category as you'd like.