example of teacher gradebook requirements

["Daniel P. Kionka" <dkionka@blueneptune.com>]

There has been discussion about grade books and XML definitions, so I
thought it might help to explain what I did to take care of grades this
semester.  This is only useful for people designing these systems to
make sure they will provide all the features and make it easier than it
is now.

For background, I am a full time software engineer, and teach a
programming class at a junior college.  I don't know much about
teaching, but as an engineer, I know I need the computer to help.  This
is only my second semester, so I am still trying to figure out what I am
doing.  I turned in the final grades yesterday, so today is a good day
to review what happened.

I realized that I had to keep track of the students in a spreadsheet, so
I finally gave in to MS and ran Excel.  I had to keep track of 2 very
separate things, grades and attendance.  (It is not that the college
cares if the students attend class -- they get government money based on
student hours.)  I set up 2 spreadsheets with the same social security
number and name list.  This ended up being very bad because of the
dynamic nature of the enrollment.

The first day I had 30 students with 15 more asking to add.  I put in
all 45, and after I got some drops I called or emailed the other 15, but
by then most had signed up for some other class and were not
interested.  I ended up with 27 students.  This college lets you drop
after midterms, so my final list was 17.  But I still had to report the
attendance for all of them, so they had to stay in my spreadsheet.

What was really bad was doing all this shuffling and trying to keep the
2 spreadsheets in sync.  What I think would really help would be to have
a single record for each student, but be able to view it as the grade or
attendance list.  In fact, then you could have a 3rd view for contact
info (phone, email, etc.)

I have to admit that Excel is a very useful program.  When I entered
something that looked like a date it converted it to a standard format. 
I was able to justify columns and change colors so the tests looked
different from the homework grades.

I was able to set up formulas for figuring out the grades, but this is
where a specialized application could help.  I had to write the Excel
formula to take 5 assignments, with the 5th worth double points, plus an
extra credit, and have that be 30% of the grade.  There were also tests,
quizzes and class participation.  I added a dummy record where I could
put in all 100s or 50s to see if I got the same final score.  It took a
few tries until I did.  I even figured out the formulas to do means and
medians for each test or assignment and then how to rank the students,
since I had to grade on a curve.  I usually hate being limited to what
the application decides I want to do, but in this case I would have
appreciated an application that did this for me.

One thing I did by hand was figure out the attendance hours.  I counted
the number of classes attended and multiplied by the hours per class. 
The midterm and final classes don't have a lab, so it would be better if
I could have an hours-per-class value and have it add them all up.

Another interesting thing was that I took 2 different sections and
combined them into a single class.  So I had 2 separate sorted lists of
students, since all the paperwork was done by section, but they worked
together for grading.  I also had the list of dropped students that were
not part of the grading.

Another thing I added to my spreadsheet was the curve breakdown (e.g.
80-100 = A).  I had to manually put in the grades (and update them when
late homework came in).  This is something the application should do,
too.

Another minor thing is that the spreadsheet did not limit my grade
entries to numbers (until I added the formulas).  So along the way I was
able to add notes.  I sometimes kept track of whether the homework was
handed in or emailed to me (p or e), and if I gave the student a second
chance I could write the grade with "redo" next to it to look for
another version.

As I mentioned above, I hate it when I am limited by a "user friendly"
application.  I was able to do everything I needed to do with Excel.  It
was just a little tricky, especially for teachers who aren't engineers. 
If I get an application that does not let me do everything I did here, I
would probably go back to Excel.

Dan Kionka