Web Submission Feedback

This consists of several PHP files, working in conjunction with LocalMarmosetSubmissionMirror, which help implement the goals of MarkersMimickingMarmoset.

Set Up

Required Files

The proper directory structure is shown below:

Note: When downloading the attached files, be sure to rename the extensions to .php where appropriate.

handmarking.php

Belongs directly under your public_html directory. This will display a list of the assignments currently being handmarked, with a link to each assignment. Details on editing this file in the WebSubmissionFeedback#NewAssns section below.

handmarking Directory

Under public_html, create a handmarking directory and place all of the following files inside:

.htaccess

Either in the same directory or a parent directory, there must be a .htaccess file with contents combining the requirements of HtaccessForPHP and RequireUseridsForSecureWebAccess. See attached file for an example.

permissions.php

This requires a coursestaff.term file to exist in order to work. This file must be created manually under your course's home directory. For details on the format of this file, see ClassListPerlModule.

For documentation on the PHP file itself, and the up-to-date official contents of the file, see RestrictingWebAccessToCourse.

do_mail.php

NOTE: There were some issues with sending mail through php during the W11 term, so the alternative mail_script.sh was used (see attached).

Sends an email to the students with their mark, along with TA comments on their submission. This also saves a copy of the TA's comments in the markingcache directory and adds a file corresponding to the marked student in the processed directory. (For more details on these directories, see the WebSubmissionFeedback#DirStruct section below.)

grab_submissions

Defines functions for reading the student's submissions from the handin directory. This is not a PHP program, but should be in the handmarking directory with the other files.

show_submission.php

Ensures correct display of files in both UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoding.

helpers.php

Defines helper functions required by handmarking.php

Creating New Assignments

Follow the instructions on LocalMarmosetSubmissionMirror to create a subdirectory under handin for each project that will be handmarked. When you have created all the appropriate subdirectories for the assignment (i.e. one per question), edit the available array in handmarking.php by adding a new Bundle object as follows:

new Bundle("Assignment Name", "Question 1", "Question 2", ..., "Question n")

where the first argument is the name of the assignment, and each subsequent argument is the name of the questions being handmarked for the assignment. Note that the question names must match the names of the corresponding subdirectories in handin.

Directory Structure

The above scripts will create a file structure under /~csXXX/course/ta_marmoset/ that looks like the following for each project (i.e. question):

Below is an explanation of these directories:

currently_marking

Stores a list of files corresponding to students currently in a TA's marking queue. The first line of each file is the id of the marking TA; the second line is the id of the student, followed by a hyphen, followed by the submission number.

markingcache

Stores the TA's comments for each marked submission. Files are named as [TA id]_[student id]-[submission number].

marks

Stores the marks for each student. Files are named by student id and contain a single line consisting of the mark received.

processed

Stores a list of files corresponding to each marked student. The files are in the same format as for currently_marking.

submissionlogs

Stores a list of files corresponding to each student with a Marmoset submission. Each file contains a single line consisting of the student id, followed by a hyphen, followed by the submission number.

Troubleshooting

See TroubleshootingPHP.

Potential Improvements

• Make it work with commands like submit nicely, too.
• Provide a facility to see a feedback history.
• Allow marking of non-text files.

Providing a proper queue

Adapt the following public test code to sort submissions by date?

#!/usr/bin/env perl

# Find all files in the directory ending with .request, and sort them
# by date.

print STDERR "Usage: $0 \n" and exit 1 unless @ARGV == 1;

my $path = shift;
opendir my($dir), $path;
my @files = sort { (stat($a))[9] <=> (stat($b))[9] }
   grep { -f "$path/$_" and /\.request$/ } readdir $dir;
closedir $dir;

print join("\n", @files) . "\n";