GRADE BOOK

Group C Software

SYSTEM MANUAL

1

Table of Contents

User Tasks3

System Criticalness6

System Maintenance7

System Administrator Tasks

Installation Trouble Shooting8

Weekly Database Backup10

Semester Ending System Maintenance11

User Support12

System Limitations and Failures12

Glossary15

Index16

USER TASKS

The Automated Grade Book provides the user with all the necessary functionality for grade entry and retrieval in a typical undergraduate introductory computer science class. The system provides a graphical user interface that provides the user with a convenient interface for all grade functions. The Automated Grade Book provides the user with the opportunity to perform all necessary operations to configure the grade book to a given class, input grades, and generate reports about the given grades.

The user configures the Automated Grade Book to fit a given semester through the Add/Delete Students and Add/Delete Assignments subsystems. From the Welcome Screen, one may choose the second button Add/Delete Students or Add/Delete Assignments to tail the system to a specific semester. Students are added and deleted from the database through the Add/Delete Student subsystem. All student records are indexed by the student id as the primary key and save the first name, last name, section number, and grading method as attributes to the student table. The subsystem checks that a student does not already exist with the given primary key in the database before actually inserting a new student record into the database. When a student is successful added, a new student is inserted with the given values and a grade is inserted in the database with the student’s grade of every assignment initially assigned to zero points. When the user deletes a student, the user selects the student id from a drop down menu, which guarantees the student id does exists in the student record table. After a successful deletion of a student, the student record and all corresponding grade records are deleted from the database. Similarly to the Add/Delete Student subsystem, the Add/Delete Assignment subsystem performs an interface for the user to manipulate the assignment table of the database. All assignment records are stored with assignment name as the primary key with the assignment category and the maximum number of points stored as attributes. Again the subsystem checks that an assignment with the given assignment name does not already exist in the database before adding a new assignment. When the assignment is added successfully an assignment record is added to the assignment table and a new attribute matching the assignment name is added to all rows of the grade table with the initial value of zero for all students. The subsystem automatically adjusts the weights of all assignments of the same assignment category to conform to the Gandhe Curve. From the Add/Delete Student and Add/Delete Assignment, one sees the two subsystems greatly simplify the addition of records into the database through the given GUI for the both subsystems. To reuse the Automated Grade Book from semester to semester, the user must have the ability to enter new students and new assignments each semester for the grade book to have any long lasting value to the user.

After the user setups up the proper students in the given class and the assignments to be used during the semester, one may now input the students’ grades on each specific assignment. The Edit Student Info subsystem performs the grade input task. The user must complete an entry in a grade matrix, in which the columns list all the assignments and the row list all the student ids. The user enters a grade in the cell that corresponding the specific student & assignment and inputs the grade the student receives. Then the subsystem updates a value in the grade table of the database. Before the update to the database is actually the inputted value is checked to be greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to the maximum number of points. As one can see, the Edit Student Info performs a very convenient GUI to the grades table in the database. Obviously the user must possess the ability to edit the grades of the students for the system to serve any useful tasks for the user.

The user can request three types of reports from the Automated Grade Book: a performance review of a student, a performance review of an assignment or the final grades of a class. The tasks of generating a report are subdivided into the Performance Review subsystem and the Print Final Grade subsystem. The Performance Review subsystem has been designed into the two modules of a student performance review and an assignment performance review. The Performance Review of a student simply queries the database for the grades table of a specified student and formats the output into a report that the system displays to the user. The Performance Review must query the database for the assignment attribute in all entries of the grade table. In addition to displaying the results of the query, the Performance Review subsystem also displays statistic data about the grade distribution of that assignment including the mean, median, and standard deviation. While the Performance Review simply queries the database and then formats the results in a report, the Print Final Grades subsystem must perform numerous calculations. The Print Final Grades must make sure the student meets the passing criteria set forth in the Gandhe Curve. If the student has maintained a 70% attendance rate, earned a 50% or above on the project, earned a 50% on both the midterm and final exam or the makeup exam, and the student’s overall grade exceeds 50%, then the student passes the course. All students passing the course are ranking and the top 30% receive As, the next 40% receive Bs, and the remaining passing students receive Cs. The students’ grades are calculated with the following weights: 10% homework, 30% project, 30% midterm, and 30% final exam. If the student benefits from the makeup replacing both the midterm and final exam, then the makeup exam counts for 60% of the total grade and the midterm and final exam results are not used in grade calculation. After the Print Final Grades subsystem calculates the final grades, the subsystem displays the results in a user report format. As one can see, the Performance Review and Print Final Grades subsystem allow the user to view the current grades of the class in a vary of different formats. Obviously, one would consider a grade book that does not provide final grades as a useless product, but the Automated Grade Book provides the user with other display options in which to evaluate students or assignments.

System Criticalness

The Automated Grade Book was not designed to be a critical system. The design of the Automated Grade Book focused on making the grade book available most of the time, which no specific uptime goals build into the system. The design goal of the Automated Grade Book was to make the system available to the user at any point when the user accesses their computer. However, the system should remain an uptime of 24 hours day, 7 days a week, with the exception of the time for system maintenance by the system administrator. If the system administrator decides to due daily maintenance (which exceeds the recommended amount of maintenance), one would only expect the system to have an offline time of only 15 minutes maximum. As one see, the Automated Grade Book does not have any strict uptime intervals for the user, but only needs to perform the user tasks when the user desires.

System Maintenance

The system administrator needs only to perform a small set of system maintenance to the optimized performance of the Automated Grade Book. About once a week or whenever a large amount of information has been entered into the database, the system administrator should do a backup of the current state of the database. The weekly backup of the database should be stored on the user’s computer so that it can be quickly restored and also on another form on stable storage. The stable storage device must be a CD if a CD writer can be made available to the given PC, or the weekly database can be loaded onto a file server if the network runs through the given PC. In addition to weekly database backups, the system administrator must perform system maintenance at the end of each semester. The system administrator should archive the database both on the user current PC, on some form of stable source such as CD to be given to the user, and onto a backup CD to be kept by the system administrator. After the system administrator archives the entire database, one should delete all students from the database due to the fact the user will have a whole new class of students the following semester. Depending on the users’ needs, the system administrator may need to delete all assignments, but one would figure if the instructor teaches the same course, the assignment given would be similar from semester to semester. As one can see, the system administrator needs only perform two system maintenance functions: weekly database backups and end of semester maintenance.

System Administrator Tasks

Installation Trouble Shooting

The system administrator should be able to install the Automated Grade Book without any problems in most cases. If the system administrator experiences problems in the installation of the system, one except the problem to concern the database or the operating system. At this time the only two known system configurations can that could result in a failed installation would be either an improperly configured database connection or a Windows 2000 compatibility problem.

In the case of an improper database configuration the user’s system must be reconfigured to modify the default of the ODBC connection. In most systems, Windows will setup the correct values during the Microsoft Access installation. If the system administrator needs to reconfigure the ODBC, one should follow the given steps:

  1. From the Start menu on the desktop select the Settingmenu, then select Control Panel.
  2. Double click on the icon labeled 32bit ODBC.
  3. The ODBC Data Source Administrator should appear.
  4. Select the User DSN tab and click the Add button.
  5. The Create New Source dialog box should appear.
  6. Scroll down to the Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb).
  7. Click on Finish.
  8. The ODBC Microsoft Access Setup screen dialog box will appear.
  9. Enter a data for the data source in the Data Source Name text field.
  10. Click the Select button.
  11. Select the file using the Directories folder. If the system was installed using the default path, this value will be C:\ProgramFiles\GradeBook\gradebook.mdb.
  12. Click OK to return to the Microsoft Access Setup screen.
  13. Click OK to return to the ODBC Data Source Administrator screen.
  14. Click OK to return the Control Panel window.
  15. Click on X in the upper right corner to close the Control Panel window.

After completing the following steps, the system administrator should restart the installation of the Automated Grade Book from the beginning. As one can see, by following a few simple steps, the system administrator can correct any problems with the database configuration of a given system.

In the case of a Windows 2000 compatibility issue, the system administrator would find the solution to properly install the Automated Grade Book to be much more difficult. In most cases, the system will install on the Windows 2000 without any errors whatsoever. Under hardware conditions, the Windows 2000 does interface correctly with the Automated Grade Book. If the user has access to a different hardware platform, the system administrator can simply install the Automated Grade Book on one of the users other machines. In most cases, this solution will not be feasible. If the system administrator has copies of older operating systems such as Windows 95 or 98, the system administrator can install one of the older operating systems on the user PC, and then install the Automated Grade Book again. In some cases this may work, but the user may have software previous installed on their that needs Windows 2000 to perform correctly. If a new machine or operating system cannot be used, then the system administrator must coordinate with the hardware vendor and Microsoft to attempt where the machine and the operating system do not interface correctly. In contrast to the database problem, the system administrator may have to expunge a large amount of effort to install the Automated Grade Book on some machines running Windows 2000, but he/she may no problem whatsoever depending on the specific system.

Weekly Database Backup

To prevent the lost of a large amount of data in the case of a complete system failure, the system administrator should backup the database weekly or whenever the user requests a backup. The system administrator would be advised to write a simple script that would automatically make a copy of the database in a location of the user computer, and place an addition copy of the database on a file server. The benefit of a script would be the system administrator would not have to remember to perform the backup actions, the script would just run once a week. If the user requested a backup to a large amount of input on a specific day, the administrator can explicitly run the script. Some system administrator would choose to manually make backup of the database. The system administrator can simply access the file where the database is stored (the path C:\ProgramFiles\GradeBook\gradebook.mdb by default) and use the Windows Copy and Paste to add it to another directory on the user’s computer. By accessing a file server, one can perform a similar Paste function into the needed directory of the file server. As one can see, the weekly backup task performed by the system administrator should consume a very small portion of time and provides the needed data redundancy to properly protect the data.

Semester Ending System Maintenance

At the end of the every semester, the system administrator will be required to perform various system tasks to both archive last semester information and to prepare the system to be used in the upcoming semester. Similar to the weekly backup, one should produce a copy of the database on the user’s own and the file server. Additionally, the system should made two copies backup the database on a more stable storage device such as a CD. The user and system administrator will each keep one of the copies of the CD. The system administrator can use the weekly backup script to save a backup of the database on the user’s own machine and the file server, but the administrator would find no benefit to writing a script to write the database to the CD. The second CD would physically have to be added to the CD drive, therefore the process itself cannot be automated. After the database has been backed up in four different locations. One may now proceed to the end of semester maintenance. To perform system maintenance, the system administrator simply needs to enter the Add/Delete Student subsystem. The system administrator should delete all students currently in the database. The deletion of the student will delete all grades associated with that student. In some cases, the user may want the system administrator to delete all the assignments in the database using the Add/Delete Assignment subsystem. In most cases, the instructor will be teaching the same course with the same number and types of assignment, so they may desire the assignments to be left in the database. As one can see, the system administrator must perform a moderate amount of work twice a year by performing system ending backups and system maintenance.

User Support

The system administrator must be able to provide support to all the users of the Automated Grade Book. The administrator should first read the User Manual, to become familiar with the specification and parameters of the low-level user commands. All questions originating in the user lack of understanding of the User Manuals should be able to be answered by system administrator. Besides asking user questions, the system administrator does not need to provide much additional support to the user. As one can see, the system administrator main support to the users will be to elaborate on the User Manuals, which will not be needed by most users.

System Limitation and Failures

The Automated Grade Book does contain a few system limitations. The system limitations include the physical system and the static weight of grades in the automated grade book.