Implementation of grade management
Implementation of grade management
Background
The Department of System Software and Distributed Systems regularly offers various courses. In addition to seminars and internships, there are lectures with or without additional exercises, at the end of which there is often a written exam or an oral examination. Depending on the size of the course, one or more tutorials are offered, which may be supervised by different tutors. As a rule, the exercises are compulsory and are marked by the tutors.
This results in a large number of individual and group grades for a course, from which a final grade must be calculated at the end. Up to now, this calculation has been carried out using various text, CSV and XML files, XSLT stylesheets, SQL scripts and spreadsheets, which is very cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone. In particular, the processing chain is not continuous, so that files have to be converted manually again and again until the data is finally available in Stud.IP.
Job description
An administration programme for grades is to be written, which supports the complete course of a course as far as possible.
- Recording of course participants (currently WWW page with SQL database)
- Classification of exercise participants from groups (external Java programme)
- Recording of grades for exercise groups or individuals by the tutors (currently text or XML file)
- Possibility for students to query the current intermediate status
- Recording of participants in written exams or oral examinations (currently via Stud.IP)
- Control of participants in written exams (currently PalmDB database)
- Recording of exam points (currently spreadsheet)
- Evaluation of exercises and written exams (currently spreadsheet)
- Preliminary publication of exam results (currently spreadsheet, XML file, SQL database, WWW page)
- Final publication of the exam results (currently by hand in Stud.IP)
- There are also similar processes for seminars, internships and oral examinations.
Where possible, the grade management system should be integrated into the existing system or replace parts of it. For some parts (marking of exercises, exam control), an offline version for tutors and organisers that does not require an existing network connection is desirable in addition to an online version. During implementation, particular attention must be paid to the secure handling of personal data.
As this work involves working with personal data, it is essential that the legal aspects are also considered. In particular, co-operation with the data protection officer is desirable.