I’ve got 90 students to mark and I’m running behind on time. So the natural
\nthing to do is to document what I try, what works, and what I end up doing to
\nfigure out the marks for my students. Anywhere that it would come in, I will
\nhave removed any personal data from a student. Hopefully, none of the code and
\nnothing super related to the coding problem they solved comes in, either.<\/p>\n
The students made submissions through a feature known as “Dropbox” (no, not \/that\/ dropbox), and we (the TA’s) have to download a zip of all of theirsubmissions. This could be great, if it weren’t for a few obstacles.<\/p>\n
Desire2Learn’s software does not work properly with Mozilla Firefox. It uses
\nsome javascript to alter database requests that just does not seem to run right
\nin FF.<\/p>\n
I have no ability to select or view ‘students from my lab’. I have three \/paper\/
\nsheets of separately alphabetised data for each of my labs.<\/p>\n
We started off using Ubuntu 10.04 and having students write code on it and
\ncompile with gcc. Someone in our department decided it was a reasonable choice
\nto upgrade to 10.04 the week that all the students moved in, and it turns out
\nthe SunRay terminal server (we use dumb terms for our labs; lower power costs
\netc) running Solaris is for some reason incompatible with some setting in
\n10.04’s XServer. So we switched to Debian 6. And of the four linux servers for
\nthe CS department, there will always be at least one down – sometimes two,
\nrarely three, and on that occasional moment, all of them will be out of
\ncommission.<\/p>\n
It should be noted that ‘down’ here means they authenticate and suck you in,
\nwarn you about your kerberos password expiring in 350ish days (thanks! I’ll keep
\nit in mind!), display the MOTD, and then hang. No prompt appears and ^C, ^D, ^Z,<\/p>\n
Esc, Alt+Est, Alt+X, or any reasonable combination will cause anything useful.
\nIt’s like a program stuck in a while loop.<\/p>\n
Back on topic: We decided to let students use Windows and PellesC if they want,
\nbecause (sigh) it was just far more stably available than our linux systems.<\/p>\n
This meant that we needed two separare dropboxes, one for Pelles and one for
\ngcc. Yes, we know that there should be no differences (these are super simple
\nassignments), but the argumentation seems to be, “on the off chance that
\nsomething crazy happens, this is insurance and we know where this is alleged to
\nwork.”<\/p>\n
So, D2L forces me to use Internet Explorer,
\nI have 3 separately alphabetised lists of students on paper (90 out of 530)
\nI have assignments to collect across two separate dropboxes.<\/p>\n
I have written out the names of all 90 of my students from the 3 labs into a
\ntext file, tab-separated. I’ve also downloaded \/all\/ of the assignments off of
\nthe site, because it’s relatively easy to do that. Unfortunately, D2L doesn’t
\njust give the most recent submission, it gives all files – so there’s some old-
\nversions floating around that need to be gotten rid of.<\/p>\n
It’s going to have to get all of the filenames and keep only the newest ones.
\nThe first way that pops into my head is as follows.<\/p>\n
# The submissions have the dates in the filename,
\n# so the reversed output of ls will have the newest
\n# file listed first.
\n#
\nfiles = `ls`
\nfiles = files.split(“\\n”)
\nfiles.reverse!<\/p>\n
# Since the names are all generated by Desire2Learn,
\n# multiple submissions are identical for the first several
\n# characters. I chose to check against the first 16 or so,
\n# as that seems like a reasonable maximum length for a last
\n# name, to deal with the case of two people who share last
\n# names.
\n#
\n# If the first 16 characters match, this is an alternate-
\n# submission. And since I know they’re reverse-chronologically
\n# ordered, I can discard all but the first. Clever!
\n#
\ncopy_files = []
\nold_file = “…………….”
\nfiles.each do |file|
\nif file[0,15] != old_file then
\ncopy_files << file
\nold_file = file[0,15]
\nend
\nend<\/p>\n
# broken out of the loop above for clarity
\ncopy_files.each do |file|
\n`cp “#{file}” “filtered\/#{file}”`
\nend<\/p>\n
Now I need to deal with the much harder problem of only marking my students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Automating the Grading process I’ve got 90 students to mark and I’m running behind on time. So the natural thing to do is to document what I try, what works, and what I end up doing to figure out the marks for my students. Anywhere that it would come in, I will have removed any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/73"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wcarss.ca\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}