The DCS grading programs — where to get your class list for a grades file

Quick basics A fast introduction for TAs Change history   File format The "grades" program Command-line programs   Working with letter grades Getting your class list Posting marks for your students Submitting your final grades Sending grades files by mail Installing the programs Working with Excel Working with Blackboard Previous versions

Before you can record marks, you need to have a list of students to give marks to. I suppose you could type in the names and student numbers from the work submitted, but I'm not Mr. Chips and you probably aren't either.

From CDF

This is the easy way: the CDF staff download class lists and put them in this directory on CDF: 

/u/csc/instructors/classlists

The lists are updated frequently when the term is young, less often later on after the enrolment settles down.

You'll want to convert your class list to the standard form for the grading programs. This program does it for you: 

/u/csc/instructors/bin/cdf2grades

If you're in /u/csc/instructors/classlists and your course is CSC123H1F, with a list in a file by that name, this is a simple way to put the current list in a file called "todayslist" in your home directory: 

../bin/cdf2grades CSC123H1F > $HOME/todayslist

Then, of course, you need to add a header defining the marks.

From Blackboard

You can also download your class list as a .csv file from Blackboard and manually convert the download to the right format. To figure out how to do that, please read Working with Blackboard.