The DCS grading programs — changes since the 2011 version first appeared

14 Jun 2013

There is just one change: the rounding convention for displaying calculated marks is now "up" when there is a tie, rather than "to nearest even".

To install this update, just copy the current grade.jar file; you don't have to re-install the scripts.

14 May 2013

There have been three changes:

• There was an embarrassing failure to handle numerical error properly in calculated letter grades. It has been corrected.

  Happily this only affected grades at the boundary between D and D+ (57%), which were displayed as D; and it is also reassuring that any further calculation with these grades would have been correct; but it still should not have happened.

• In grades, the file opening and closing dialogues use a different Java GUI component (JFileChooser instead of FileDialog). On Linux, this makes it clearer what to do when you've selected a file; on Mac OS, it guarantees that the file extension will be properly included when the default file name for saving is displayed. On the other hand, the new dialogues are stupider than the old ones, especially on Mac OS.
• The outrageous CPU usage of grades has been tamed, at the cost of no longer highlighting the column header cells of selected columns. You probably won't notice the change, but your computer might.

To install this update, just copy the current grade.jar file; you don't have to re-install the scripts.

In addition, this documentation has changed somewhat. First, a section on GUI oddities has been added near the beginning of the page on grades; and secondly, the material on pre-2011 versions has been tucked away where it won't bother you.

If you find any broken links or other errors in the documentation, please tell me.

23 Apr 2013

Three things have changed:

• Gupdatedrops now requires you to set the column number where student numbers start in the class-list file. (In CDF class lists, they start at 9.) This is how things should have been all along.
• The output from glint has been cleaned up to cut down on redundant error messages. Similarly, the corresponding "check" tool in the GUI program grades is quieter about whether there might have been problems during file input, and about whether some student records might be being omitted from checking.
• Gpr now has a -X option that omits the "normalization" or standardization usually applied to student names when you print a file. Similarly, grades no longer forces you to accept standardized names when you type the name of a student — probably a rare activity.

To install this update, copy the current grade.jar file.

One thing has not changed:

• The "e-Marks" mark submission system used in the Faculty of Arts and Science now allows you to check a box indicating that a student did not write your examination. The grades-submission program gsub does not help you with this. For some comments on the reasons, see "Submitting your final grades".

There is also a minor change to the "makecmds" script used when you install the grading programs on your own machine: it executes under /bin/bash instead of /bin/sh.

12 Dec 2012

There are no changes to the programs except that on the Mac with Java 7 things are properly Macish now. For boring details, see the comments of 10 May 2012 under "Java 7".

To install this update, just copy the current grade.jar file.

7 Sep 2012

There are no changes to the programs, but Java 7 on the Mac has grown up a little and the comments below (under "Java 7" for 10 May 2012) have been updated to say so.

There are also some changes to the documentation, especially the page on "Installing the programs".

10 May 2012

Command-line programs

As promised earlier, gsub now produces a mark submission file meeting the current requirements of the Faculty of Arts and Science. It is the same program that was formerly named "gsub11"; the old "gsub" has simply vanished.

The GUI program

The GUI program, grades (or grade), is no longer labelled "beta", since nobody but me had reported errors. It must obviously be totally correct.

There were however certain infelicities encountered by users, and some of them have been addressed:

• The initial window size, used when a grades file is first displayed, is larger. No size can be perfect, but the revised setting should be less annoying. The window width now depends on the number of mark columns, and the default column widths are probably more sensible.
• There are keyboard equivalents for all the items in the "Tools" menu. You probably won't remember them most of the time, but at the end of term, when you're madly entering marks, printing files, looking at statistics, and calculating grades, the shortcuts should stick with you for a while. Sadly, the keyboard shortcut for the "Print" command has changed, for the sake of uniformity.
• The "Calculate" button in the middle of the window is gone. You can learn the keyboard equivalent instead: alt-command/control-C.
• There's a "Submit" item in the Tools menu. It's like gsub.
• There's also a "Select all students" item in Tools. This was intended to satisfy one particular user, namely me; if you have similar changes you'd like, please say so. I find this command helpful when entering marks for all the students in one tutorial or lab, then for all those in another lab, and then another.
• Sorting the students no longer sets the "changed" flag, so you can close the window without being forced either to save it or to wonder what undesirable change you might be accidentally preserving. This tended to get me when I opened a file, sorted it, and then went for coffee; perhaps you are less forgetful than I.

Java 7

Update, Dec. 2012: This works now on the Mac, and I have no reason to think it doesn't on Linux and Windows.

So you can skip this section. The rest of it is only here so you can see why I made such a fuss.

Outline

Java 7 (or 1.7) is was released for the Macintosh in late April 2012. It had been out for Windows and Linux for several months, but I work on a Mac, so that made it time to see how the grading programs liked it.

The command-line programs compiled in Java 6 pass all their tests in Java 7 on the Mac, as you'd pretty much expect. If you want to run Java 7 on any other platform, you can assume they will be all right there too.

The GUI program, "grades", is not quite so happy: nothing is actually broken, but there are some uglinesses, at least on the Mac. Here's a summary of the state of affairs with Java 7 on each of the only three OSes in the world.

Mac

The menus are at the tops of windows instead of at the top of the screen. This can be fixed, but only by creating other problems that are worse. Consequently, it's staying unfixed.

Update, Sept. 2012: The "worse" problems now (in Java 1.7u7) are not so bad as in May: now, the trouble is just that keyboard equivalents are not listed in the menus. I still think that's worse than having the menus in the wrong place, so I'm sticking with May's way.

Tooltips work now. They didn't in May, and that was an unfixable serious nuisance, so thank goodness for that.

As Java updates come out, I'll check to see whether we can have the menus where they really belong. In the meantime, Java 7 is still "a little rough around the edges", as I said in May, but I no longer recommend sticking with Java 6.

Update, Dec. 2012: Keyboard equivalents are now shown in menus, as needed, now that Java 1.7u10 is out. There's no further need to use non-Mac style menus.

Linux

A quick check (on CDF) seems to show that grades works with Java 7 on Linux 7 — that is, the known problems on the Mac are not problems on Linux.

Windows

I don't have a Windows Java 7 available to try, but it seems likely that the situation is the same as on Linux. I'd be glad to have confirmation or refutation of that.

4 Apr 2012

No changes to the programs, but the documentation about mark submission and about gsub11 has been updated.

6 Dec 2011

To install this update, you need to pick up new copies of both grade.jar and makecmds from your preferred location (CS Lab or CDF). You need the new makecmds because there's a new command, gsub11. After fixing makecmds for your installation, run makecmds.

Changes in the command-line programs

There is a new program, gsub11, intended to help with grade submission in the Faculty of Arts and Science, under the new requirements for the fall 2011 session.

Changes in grades

Fixed bug that allowed grades to discard your work by closing a window after a failed write. This could have happened if, for example, you didn't have write permission on the file.

Other changes to grades, with thanks to Paul Gries for suggestions:

• changed the style of open and save dialogues for file choosing.
• cleaned up the cut, copy and paste operations.
• added undo and redo.
• added fill-down.
• added colouring to mark the current row.
• added a "Calculate" button to the bar between the header and the student data, in the hope that it would make the end-of-term work a little easier. I made this change somewhat against my better judgement, because the purpose of the button bar with its two buttons for installing the header and saving the file was partly educational, to remind you that those are two separate steps, and that if you change the header and want to keep the changes, you need to go through both those steps.

There are comments on some of these changes in the documentation for the grades program.

7 Nov 2011

First bug: grades was not seeing changed individual formulas. Fixed.

To fix your installation: copy the latest grade.jar from wherever you prefer (CS Lab or CDF).

Explanation: (1) failure to check modified comments to see if they might include formulas; (2) failure to notice that changing a mark would erase an existing individual formula unless specific preservative action was taken. (1) was maybe not stupid but somewhat uninsightful. (2) was hard to notice, and things like this may produce more troubles.

No effect on the command-line programs, but a worry for the GUI one.

2 Nov 2011

It's out there now. Nothing changed yet.