I love helping students. I like giving them feedback and spending one on one time with them. Do you know what I don't like? Finding complex mechanisms to simplify marking 70 assignments where the comments get repetitious and bogged down. Toss in a little sleep loss and a terrible system to upload grades and you've got a recipe for messing up.
In comes Lazy TA! Currently, it only supports one simple format for rubrics, but future plans are to include a configuration file to let you fully customize the parsing to suit your needs.
Lazy TA takes in a rubric as a text file and reads through it, pulling out all relevant information. That relevant information comes in three forms:
- Grade Items: Individual things students get marked for.
- Grade Sections or Categories: Specific categorized sections which grade items fall under.
- Problems: Problems are the overarching collection of categories and items.
For basic assignments, all you need to do is drop it into your folder with the rubric,
compile if you haven't already (javac Tester.java) and run it (java Tester).
For a custom filename to output the report to, type it in as command line arguments.
For example, to output to graded.out I would run the command java Tester graded.out.
It's easy.
If you're feeling ambitious, there's also the groundwork for automated marking. It's currently a long ways off of being very viable, but you can extend the class and overwrite the "automation" method. Check out the comments for more details on that. It's my end goal to allow you to easy use custom Test objects which will run automated marking and report it properly with ease.
At the moment, not super flexible. I tried to make the built in parsing as general as I could, but it was built hastily for one specific course.
- Make a Test object that makes automated testing easy
- Set up configuration files to make parsing the rubrics very flexible and simple to work with
- Set up a way to have Test objects read in from a text file, allowing for automated testing in any language that supports file i/o
Me! My name is Connor Hillen and I wrote this because I am a teaching assistant at Carleton University helping to TA computer science. It was just a quick one day project and might develop off and on. I hope some people get use out of it and it gives you more time to help out and destress!