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How to setup and maintain online grades

If you maintain your course on the Mechanical Engineering web server, the on-line grading system makes it easy for students in a course to access their scores and grades on assignments and is easy for the course instructor to administer. A master EXCEL gradesheet is kept on a local computer, then periodically uploaded to the course home page. Each student is assigned a gradebook password which they use to access their grades. The system is secure because the database on the course page contains no names, student id's nor other identifying information.Here's a brief overview on how to setup the system and how to update the grades. If you have any questions, contact Will Durfee (wkdurfee@tc.umn.edu)

Creating the EXCEL grades file

For things to work, your Excel grades spreadsheet must be in a particular format. (If you want an example, e-mail Durfee)

1. Headers go in the first two rows
2. You can have anything you want in columns 1-5. The following is suggested: Col 1 = Section name, Col 2 = Name (Lastname,Firstname format), Col 3 = Nickname, Col 4 = E-mail, Col 5 = Student ID.
3. Column 6 contains the 4 digit grades password
4. Col 6, Row 1 has "Assignment". Col 6 Row 2 has "Weight" or can be left blank.
5. Columns 7-N contain assignment scores, totals, or whatever else you want the student to see. Row 1 of these columns has the assignment :

Web setup

1. Create a directory coursepage/grades/data/, where "coursepage" is your course home page.
2. Copy grades.html from Menet directory /stage/www-me/cgi-bin/me5254/testing/grades/ into your coursepage/grades.
3. Copy pub.pl from Menet directory /stage/www-me/cgi-bin/me5254/testing/grades/ into your coursepage/grades/data.
4. Edit grades.html to fit your course. At a minimum, change (1) the datafile parameter to point to file grades.dat in your data/ directory, (2) the course parameter to be your course name, (3) the coursehomepage parameter to point to your course homepage. Also, at the bottom, change the pointer to the file which has the list of all course assignments (or comment this section out if no list exists).
5. Create a link to grades/grades.html on your course homepage, or wherever appropriate.
6. Create the course grade sheet in Excel on your local computer (formatting instructions below). WARNING: Do not store the Excel grade sheet in a location where others could access it. In particular, be careful if stored anywhere other than a local PC.
7. Assign each student a confidential gradebook password. Suggest using a 4 digit random integer between 1001 and 9999. You can generate a stream of random integers in Excel. Look in Tools --> Data Analysis --> Random Number Generation.

Updating the grades

1. Open your grade sheet in Excel.
2. Save As in text format with tab delimiters. Save to filename grades.txt
3. Upload grades.txt (ftp using ASCII transfer mode) to the grades/data/ directory of your course web site.
4. At the Unix prompt (%), type: perl pub.pl This converts grades.txt to grades.dat and deletes grades.txt. In the process, it strips the first several columns of the grade sheet to eliminate all student name and id information. All that remains to identify a grade set is the grades password. This is what makes the whole system secure.

WARNING: Do not upload your grades.txt file and forget to run pub.pl. If you don't run pub.pl, grades.txt which includes names, student id's and passwords is available for viewing by anyone who happens to be rummaging around the web file system.

Additional information

This on-line grades system is limited to courses whose web pages are on the MEnet web system, run by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. This is because the Perl processing scrips must access data on a common file system. If you are not part of MechE, feel free to copy the Perl scripts over to your own web server. The scripts are reasonably generic and should run on any web server which can handle Perl cgi scripts.

For University of Minnesota courses, an alternative is to use the U's WebCT system which has an on-line grades feature. We have found our system to be simpler to set up and simpler to maintain, but WebCT is a viable alternative. Consult the WebCT home page for details.

The utility mailpsswd.pl is for sending grade passwords to the students. Look at the comments in that file for details.

Questions? Contact wkdurfee@tc.umn.edu