When your course is over, you need to calculate and submit your final grades. You may need to make some difficult pedagogical decisions, but this is not the place to offer advice on those choices; instead, you should consult the Undergraduate Office and the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies (or their equivalents on your campus or in your department.)
You do need to know how to use the grading programs to get your work done. Here are some programs and facilities to use and the questions they can help you with:
- Gen calculates final grades for you.
- Selection options let you omit students who have dropped your course from calculations and from any statistics you report.
- Gstats produces statistics about about your final grades — average marks and counts in various mark ranges.
- Gsub "submits" your grades by putting them into an appropriate file.
A way forward
Here is a possible sequence of steps through the calculation and submission process. We'll suppose you have a grades file called "allmarks" where you define a grade called "finl" that is the grade you want to report.
Calculate
gen allmarks
This calculates absolutely everybody's final grades, including grades for the students who have clearly dropped the course.
Flag the dropouts
You might already have set the "dropped" indicator for some of your students, but take a look at the final grades, and note which students did not write your final examination. They may not have dropped (if they were ill, for example), but from the point of view of grading, they might as well have dropped. Set their flag character to indicate this; I use 'x'.
Now clear the finl mark for those students who have dropped the course or are marked 'x'. There is no command-line program to do this for you; instead, use a text editor or the grades program. Just remove the content of finl; don't set it to 0, and don't clear any other calculated marks. (It's going to turn out that some of those students haven't really dropped your course, and you'll need any intermediate calculations to help you produce new final grades for them, if it comes to using a calculator.)
Recalculate
gen -d -ox allmarks
Get used to saying "-d -ox": omit the dropouts and the students flagged 'x'. When you forget, you have to clear out all the final grades for those students. Again. (Unless you're using grades.)
Look at the statistics
gstats allmarks
How many failures do you have? how many As? What's the average finl mark?
gstats -d -ox
Same questions, but for just the students who wrote the exam. (Gstats automatically separates the dropouts for you, but it doesn't look after flag characters unless you ask it to.)
Differences between TAs
You may reasonably suspect that your various TAs mark differently. Depending on how you've arranged the marking for your course, you may want to adjust their marks, and you'll need to start by looking at the statistics for the different groups.
Suppose you have a "mark" called "TA" that identifies each student's TA. Here's how to get the mark statistics for the TA named "Jim":
gstats -d -ox -vTA=Jim
Adjust your marks
Technically, this is easy: change the formulas you use to calculate the mark called finl. As a teacher, however, you have to think hard here, and you may want to seek advice from the Undergraduate Office or the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies.
Submit your marks
The Faculty of Arts and Science, UTSC and possibly other divisions require you to use the "e-Marks" system for submitting marks. You should have received instructions about it from the Undergraduate Office (or your local equivalent) before any grades are due..
One of the ways you can submit marks through e-Marks is by providing a CSV (comma-separated values) file containing — one student per line — the student number and the mark, like this:
1234567890,76
0987654321,88
The program gsub allows you to generate an appropriate CSV file from your grades file:
gsub -d -ox -m finl allmarks > submitfile.csv
For details, see the
explanation of gsub.
Notice right now, however, that
the name of the file you submit must end in
".csv".
The grading programs don't care about that, but e-Marks insists
on it, possibly by just ignoring your file without an error
message.
Gsub itself is pretty simple and seldom produces error messages if your grades file is error-free. However, the e-Marks system itself complains if there are students on your class list for whom you do not submit marks, or if there are students not on the list for whom you do submit marks. To satisfy e-Marks, you need to adjust gsub's selection criteria until you get the desired set of marks.
We used to have a program markscan that checked mark submission files for validity and counted the marks in various ranges. Now e-Marks makes things simpler, and that program no longer exists.
What problems could there possibly be?
Here are some of the issues you'll have to deal with:
- Some students for whom you do have records have nevertheless dropped your course.
- Your faculty (via e-Marks) is demanding marks for students who appear to have dropped your course, in the sense that they don't have all the usual marks. For example, they may not have written the examination.
- Your faculty is not demanding marks for students who appear to have completed all the expected work in your course.
Students who have dropped your course — the ones in point (1) — really cause little trouble. The Faculty isn't asking for their marks, and you may already have set their drop indicators anyway. If not, go back to "Flag the dropouts" and mark them properly.
The students from point (2) may have dropped your course in fact, but they have not dropped it on the official records, and you must submit marks for them. You may possibly have flagged them with an 'x'. Unflag them and re-gen. Sometimes it's helpful to pick another flag such as 'y' for them, so that you can look at the statistics without them:
gstats -o xy allmarks
And the students from point (3)? Those are the ones who did all the work you required in the course, but somehow never enrolled. You can handle these cases in two ways:
- Do nothing now. Eventually they'll figure out there's a problem, and the giant administrative machine will request marks from you.
- Figure out their marks now, and submit them according to whatever special procedure is currently appropriate. The Undergraduate Office will happily tell you how.
I admire people who do the second thing, but have to admit that I myself do the lazy first thing.
There may be other odd cases too, including sometimes students who clearly did finish the course but are not in the reporting file. Ask the Undergraduate Office for help on what you should do with them, and adjust your grades file to suit the situation.
Marks of the wrong type
Every Faculty imposes limitations on the kinds of marks you can submit — integers? letter grades? grade points? something else? In the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto, marks must be integers in the range 0 to 100, but gsub has no idea what Faculty you're in. Consequently it allows you to "submit" grades that will not be accepted by your Faculty, such as fractional numbers, negative numbers, and letter grades. You just have to keep going until your dean, or your e-Marks, is happy.
Students who missed the exam
Currently — April 2013 — e-Marks gives you a chance to tick a box for those students who did not write your final examination. There may be a way for this to be indicated in a CSV submission file, but gsub does not provide that capability. If you want to supply that information, you will have to do it by hand.
There are two reasons for limiting gsub in this way. First, the obvious way to do it is to have you supply the name of a mark column containing the exam mark; but what about marks of zero? Are they did-not-writes or just terrible exams?
The second reason for leaving this unautomated is that it's a pretty significant single bit of information. Students who missed the examination can much more easily obtain a deferred exam or late withdrawal, so it's very important to get this detail right.
Providing the did-not-write is optional. If you do it, please do it carefully.
Handing the marks in
The final step in marks submission is to get your records to the Undergraduate Office. Procedures vary from year to year, but the Office is likely to want at least these things:
- your raw-data grades files — preferably a single one for the entire course
- your term marks in some more readable form, such as garchive output
- an explanation of any odd cases among the marks you are submitting
The most important thing you can do is to read the instructions that the Undergraduate Office sends you, and ask for clarification if you need it.