Gradebot

What is it?

Gradebot is just a friendly little python bot that is meant to help you automate the grading process. It is a simple framework that lets you pick where your assignments are comming from(such as a CMS like D2L or on some git server), download them, automatically run some set of unit tests on them, save the results of the tests, and eventually allow you to automatically submit grades back to your learning management utility such as D2L or Blackboard.

Dependencies

• python3

Workflow

1. Create the assignment folders using some assignment identifier. Gradebot recognizes this as the aid parameter. aid will be the name of the folders that gradebot looks for to find submissions, unit tests, and output directories.

   ./gradebot -c <aid>

2. Build the unit tests to run against each assignment. All unit tests for your assignment can be found in tests/<aid>. The previous step will have created this folder for you and copied in a template unit test as well as a template __init__.py. Each unit test will consist of a python module inside of the folder which imports and runs a register_test method which allows the test to auto register itself with Gradebot. Each module should define a class which takes a config object in its constructor and exposes a run method which takes a submission object as a parameter. Each run method should return a ut_result object. Once the module has been written it should be added to the __init__.py file. If it is not Gradebot will not run the module.

3. If using D2L download your dropbox submissions and extract the contents into submissions/<aid>. The D2L module expects the students to have submitted a zip file, if this is not how you require submissions it will need to be modified.

4. Run gradebot
   ./gradebot -dp <dataprovider> -a <aid> Gradebot writes an overall log to output/gradebot.log and also writes json files to output/<aid>/<studentid>.json. These files contain the results of each unit test as well as any auto generated comments you may have put in the tests. From this point you can go back and manually review any interesting tests and make modifications to grades and comments.

5. If run with the '''-g''' flag, entries will be added to a gradebook csv file that can be configured in the config.ini file. Currently this file follows the format that D2L accepts. If using D2L you should export your initial gradebook to a csv file and use that as your grade file. As assignments are graded this file can then be reuploaded to D2L for automatic grade importing. Gradebot will need to be tweaked to work with other grading systems for automatic grading.

6. When gradebot is run with -g it will also generate feedback text files which are found at /output/<aid>/feedback. This directory contains individual text files as well as a zip file which can be imported into D2l for bulk uploading of feedback.

Interesting file locations

• resources/ - contains most of the object type definitions such as submission and ut_result
• tools/ - contains data provider modules for d2l and other general utility classes

Gradebot options

• -dp | Dataprovider, valid options are d2l, bb, gh, gl
• -a | aid, id of the assignment to create
• -d | enalbe debug prints
• -c | create entries for an assignment
• -r | remove folders and contents for a specific assignment
• -g | generate feedback files which can be uploaded to d2l
• -ng | Do not auto grade files, can be used in conjunction with -g to generate grades and feedback after manual review