Re: example of teacher gradebook requirements

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

Do you have any copyright protection when you send mail to a mailing list
where you have no idea who is on that list?  And would the members of the
list be responsible if they copied any copyrighted material that someone
had posted as his own?

Maybe there should be a disclaimer that all mail is archived and may be
translated and reposted.

As far as my mail, you are free to do whatever you want with it.

Dan Kionka

On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Barret Dolph wrote:

> This is what we do in our own way. It is quite important to be able to have
> a note section. More comments on the international aspect later.
> 
> By the way, would it be possible to classify all documents as either free to
> translate and post other places or request information. I am trying to get
> some of our staff and students involved in translation and they are nervous
> about copyright laws. If writers include the information with the document
> it would be much easier.
> 
> Cordially,
> S. Barret Dolph
> Headmaster
> White Horse English
> Development Center
> Taipei Taiwan
> 
> Daniel P. Kionka wrote:
> 
> > 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
> 
> 
> 
>