Assignments Grading Application

[susham]

Application which helps to grade the assignments easily and gives the ability to provide comments to each test case. Below is the mockup of this application

[DavidWhitlock]

Hey, @susham. This is a cool idea.

Let's talk about the workflow that will be enabled by this tool:

1. Source code is submitted by student via an email to the grader account
2. Submission is downloaded to a PSU machine
3. Submission is compiled on the PSU machine and test cases are run to create an output file
   • Today, the output file is human readable. We'll need to change the output so that this tool can read it.
   • Today, the student's program is run from the UNIX command line via a shell script. I'm not sure if we should continue that or if we should invoke the main using InvokeMainTestCase or something.
   • We'll probably want a "test case file" that specifies the test cases in a way that can be read by the test runner program/script.
4. Graders grade submissions using the above tool
   • Is the tool web-based or a thick client?
     • If it's a think client, we'll have to figure out how to get information in the output files to the thick client. That is, we'll have to send the output file information over the network or copy them to the local machine.
5. Grades from the graded project reports are imported into the gradebook
6. Reports for the students are generated from the graded project reports
7. Reports are emailed to students

Does that sound right? I want to make sure that we've identified all of the work required to make this solution work.

[susham]

@DavidWhitlock

Yes, looks like most of the work is identified.

Till now, I thought this application should have a thick client, since we are connecting to the PSU linux machine with SSH where the .out files will be available. I was thinking to utilize most of the scripts that are currently used and yes we definitely need to modify the .out file, so that it could be read by the application(Possible XML format) and create the reports and send it to the students via email.

We could also discuss on the workflow of the web application.

The main reason, I was going with the thick client was due to the number of people using it.

[DavidWhitlock]

Yeah. I'd worry about the security of a web-based system. If there's a web server running on one of the CS Department's machines, it will be easily for an industrious student to find it and gain access to it.

For the initial revision of the tool, we might be able to parse the output of the current scripts. They're pretty uniform. Then again, running the main method with Java isn't a big deal, either.

Let's think some more on this...

[susham]

Yeah, I was thinking if the .out files are created in an xml format. That would be easier to parse for the thick client application, rather than parsing the current .out file. Probably, we could create the reports in an excel sheet or the format you need to send it to the students

[susham]

Hi Dave,

Below is the xml format, I was thinking to have as the output file from the script you are running to get the .out files.

Possible_xml_file.pdf

Please let me know your thoughts on this, would it be better to have a xml format or a different format?

Thanks,
Susham

[DavidWhitlock]

Hey, @susham. That looks pretty good.

I've been thinking about how to approach this tool. I actually think that the easiest way to get to something that you guys can use would be to convert the existing .out files into XML. It's probably easier to write a parser that will convert the .out to XML files that it is to replace the grading bash scripts with something that will output XML.

@susham, would you like to contribute to authoring the tool? Do you have time to do that and still get the project/quiz grading done?

I've got some time this weekend to dedicate to this. I'm not sure if we'll have something that will help with Project 2, but we might have something to help with the Project 3 grading.

[susham]

@DavidWhitlock
Yes, I have got time to work on both the grading and this project. Let me know, your availability in the weekend, so we could discuss on more on this project.

Thanks,
Susham

[DavidWhitlock]

I started capturing a bunch of thoughts on this

https://github.com/DavidWhitlock/PortlandStateJava/wiki/GUI-for-grading-projects-POA

But now I'm falling asleep. Please review it and let me know what you think.

[susham]

@DavidWhitlock

I have gone through the wiki and its awesome. All of the points that we need to work on is covered, including the workflow.

I was thinking about the version control feature. I understand, there is a concern of security when we make the project over http. But, we have the private repositories in github, assuming public can not view this repository and most of the graders use github in one way or the other. If we could get the files downloaded from the PSU Linux machine, graders could commit and push the changes to the private repository by running the git commands from the thick client. We could have another screen to configure the repository info.

I am not good on linux. I am not sure, if we can make an FTP Server or SFTP on PSU Linux which will be accessible by the graders only via SSH, so that we can use the Apache commons net api to download the files from the ftp server or sftp server, https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-net/apidocs/org/apache/commons/net/ftp/FTPClient.html

I have never worked on CVS, if that is easy to implement then we can carry on with that.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

I have

[DavidWhitlock]

Based on my experience, using CVS is fundamentally the same as GitHub. After installing the executable, you check out a repository using the command line, and you commit and update using the command line.

I use CVS for storing the grade book for the class because it contains private information I don't know if I feel comfortable having it reside in locations that I don't have access to (such as GitHub, even in a private repository). CVS is admittedly very old, but I believe that it will work for us.

I'll create a new CVS repository and make sure that I can get it working for me. If so, I'll ask you to set it up in your local environment.

[DavidWhitlock]

Okay. I think I got the CVS repository set up. After you install the executable, you should be able to do the following to check out the repository.

cvs -d sjavata@linux.cecs.pdx.edu:/u/sjavata/.repository checkout submissions/summer2017

Right now, the repository only contains a README. The intent is that this repository contain only the XML files for the submissions.

However, it will require that you have ssh installed on your local machine.

If you're on windows, you may want to consider installing cygwin to provide these UNIX tools on Windows.

Let me know how you find this process.

[susham]

@DavidWhitlock

I have used the below command to install the CVS on my local machine and then I have run the cvs command you have provided. Looks like, I was able to setup the cvs and get the README file.

Is there any way, we could run these commands from our project and install all the required softwares?

[DavidWhitlock]

Good question, @susham. We might be able to bundle all of the software required in a Docker container or something. I don't have a lot of experience doing that. From your point of view, how important is ease of installation for the environment?

[DavidWhitlock]

Okay. I've started developing the basic domain classes and the user interface for the project submission scorer application.

The code is off on a branch of my source code repository: https://github.com/DavidWhitlock/PortlandStateJava/tree/issue-208-project-submissions-scoring-ui

When you have a chance, please verify that you can check out this code, build it, and run the application on your local machine.

$ git clone git@github.com:DavidWhitlock/PortlandStateJava.git
$ cd PortlandStateJava/grader
$ git checkout issue-208-project-submissions-scoring-ui
$ mvn clean package
$ java -jar target/grader-Summer2017.jar scoreProjectSubmissions

You should see a UI pop up that contains a list of "student/Project" submissions.

At the moment, clicking on the submissions doesn't do anything.