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Ask Slashdot: Open Source Software To Manage Student Grades?
An anonymous reader writes "I have been assigned the task of finding a software package to automate the management of grades in a high school. It does not need to be a complete system, but rather just manage grading calculations and printing of report cards. The management of grades is currently done using spreadsheets. What are some open source options to handle this situation?"
Moodle has a grade management tool that might be able to handle these requirements.
Those who know will get the joke...for the rest of you http://sagemath.org/
I wrote Open Administration for Schools, along with other school software, since I REALLY was tired of using spreadsheets to do calcs. http://richtech.ca/openadmin
Free, flexible, if used on properly managed computers it's secure, skills learned in using it also applicable to other projects...
...prepare yourself to be hated by every one of your co-workers.
Finding this took less than 5 seconds: OpenGrade
Spreadsheets translate to databases which translate to websites easily if you just need some simple software for teachers to use.
Alternatively, I'd recommend JupiterGrades.com
http://jupitersis.com/
It's about $5 per year per student. Kids can access it from home, parents have their own login. They can see what homework they're missing, how a homework assignment affected their grade.
Sometimes it's just better to spend the little bit of money.
Work Safe Porn
Use whatever you want, so long as you keep the password on a little piece of paper somewhere. If you don't, may I suggest "pencil" is a good one.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
engrade.com is free. They make money from buying customer support and added features.
I'm with the spreadsheet bandwagon. Use OpenOffice. Format the bejesus out of it and use scripting and you can make it look great (even report cards).
I can recommend www.pun.net, partly because a friend of mine is lead dev.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
Your message is accurate, but your delivery almost guarantees you will be ignored. There really is no reason to be rude... To the OP, you really should be looking at Moodle, or some other Learning Management System. It's not just about the grades, but modernizing how we educate. Keep in mind this is likely a radical shift for your district, but push for it anyway.
...as much as the big nonfree alternatives, at least ( http:// moodle.org )
however, if *all* you need to do is print report cards, why not LaTeX
It may be overkill for what you need, but Moodle is open source & has a grade book. You can run it on a USB stick if you don't need to have it available over a network, and you can enroll your students with a simple plain text file.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
If you are looking for the complete package, check out Sakai CLE and the gradebook feature in particular. http://www.sakaiproject.org/learning-management
Gradebook: Calculate, store and distribute grade information to students
It should have been the first six fucking replies.
It was.
http://richtech.ca/openadmin/ looks pretty good. It has more features than you are looking for but it definitely has an online grade book and report card function.
Do you really need the source code, or are you actually asking for non-commercial instead of commercial?
Are you looking for a school information system (SIS) to store all teacher grades and print reports? Or a gradebook for individual assignments?
I made a SIS in django https://github.com/burke-software/django-sis that would let you make spreadsheet templates (with the teachers students already in) for teachers to enter grades and then upload them to submit their grades. It has a very customizable report builder for report cards that lets you edit the template in Libreoffice and throw in some variables and other magic (for student in students: do this).
For a gradebook I'd suggest Canvas. Moodle is an option, but IMO their gradebook is not very good. Canvas can't do school wide report cards by itself but has a nice API for integrating it.
http://schooltool.org/
Drupal is an option, although it is not exactly an out of the box solution as you would need to hire someone that knows a bit to do come configuration for you. I would actually consider looking at the end to end process and see if there is a better solution available, for example a solution which:
1. Functions as an LMS: courses, quizzes, grades all online - easy to use web interface for teachers to add 'content'
2. Manages grades: lose the Excel spreadsheets and have teachers post/manage the grades on the site
3. Administration: provides an interface to manage student registrations including email addresses for parents which could be used to notify them of the availability of a report card, which they can optionally log in to view or opt out of and still receive a hardcopy.
4. Anything else that needs managing, especially processes which can be automated via a web based workflow
I have built a Drupal LMS for a University course I am teaching and it is working excellent as it is much more flexible and extensible than any other options including Moodle. Also, it is important to know that through Drupal roles and organic groups a site like this can be completely tied down and secured for obvious reasons. Of course 'til they make the smart kid in the class the site admin.
Just some food for thought.
... just manage grading calculations and printing of report cards. The management of grades is currently done using spreadsheets...
I can see why that isn't working so well. I worked at a place where some rather tabular forms were generated and printed using Lotus 1-2-3, and no this isn't a "back in the 80s" story this was only a decade ago.
A better solution is spreadsheets on the backend, word processor to make the report cards look good, and a mailmerge program in between to shove spreadsheet data into the nicely formatted world proc doc all automated.
One semi-serious question is with the prevalence of grade inflation do you really need to do anything other than list the student name and sick day count, since apparently everything else will be all "A"s?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
We're calling it GAKU Engine ["Learning Engine" from Japanese]. It's fully open source (GPL). Along with full school/course/student management features and full interface for students we want to integrate features so schools can easily extend and augment their educational offerings with free/open content and external services. We'll have a Kickstarter up soon too, untill then check out the (incomplete) PR site at: http://genshin.org/en/GAKUEngine
Six or seven years ago, I worked for a small computer repair company that was providing support for a K-12 in a rural area that was using SIS, and they were looking for ways to save a buck. I found OpenSIS, which they liked (much of the interface was apparently very similar to what they were using), but the folks I was working with at the school level couldn't get support from the district level to change over.
There are different versions, depending on what you need. If you don't need some of the advanced features of it, the software shouldn't cost you anything (they charge for support/advanced features).
http://opensis.com/index.php
bork bork bork!
Seriously, you've not pointed out whats _wrong_ with your spreadsheets to help us make _any_ real suggestion.
Firstly your gunning to change a system which apparently works. This is asking for failure.
As others have pointed out this could very simply be a database + web front end, but unless you know _why_ your changing it, your likely to make it worse.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I used to teach at a local community college, and I found Excel to be the best tool for grading students work. Once you have your spreadsheet setup the way you like, its easy to re-use with each new class. I created Macros to highlight a students progress so I could show them how well their doing, what assignments they missed, and overall grade. I'm sure you could try using a database like Access, or something like Moodle, but if you just need something simple, and easy to customize, Excel is the way to go.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
How do you Google something without knowing what the proper keywords are??
also it may be getting a consensus on what works/does not work/ is painful to use is what is the Big Point in this.
in similar fashion RTFM has two problems 1 Y'all need to WTFM first 2 The Kama Sutra does not cover this topic (but is more useful than what manuals are written)
a better way of saying JFGI is "Google needs |student information system GPL|"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I don't know the availability/status, but I know it is in the works since one of my kids is working on it. And they are making improvements, which is good because I have to listen to my wife complain about Blackboard all the time.
Hi,
I have a job to do, but I am too lazy/ignorant/both to do my job or even to use Google. Dear slashdot, will you do my work for me?
or
We are some BI company and we are doing market research on this area. What is your favourite software for/which one would you recommend for this task?
Rinse and repeat...
(to the hell with mod points)
Excel.
$ yes f | ./markWork.sh
I have used Schooltool [schooltool.org] before and I thought that it was decent enough.
Use it.
What do you want in a grading system?
All schools have different rules for grading some systems can handle some others do not.
We have the traditional College Grading Method, that in general statistically automatically curves the grades. Where your final grade is based on the standard deviation from the average. So in a class the average grade was 30% and most students got around that 30% you happen to get a 40% you may have just aced that class. I actually prefer this method, this allows the teacher to teach harder stuff to the students, so the easier concepts get a lot more practice and sink in better. However colleges seem to dislike the High 2.0's which this method would most likely have the bulk to f the students get. There is also talk about the entire class failing the test on purpose so they all get better grades... However I have heard the talk before however I have never saw it happen, because there is always a good handful of kids, who just don't trust the others, so they will study and do their best.
We have Letter Grades, A, B, C, D, (E/F) then we need to determine if A is the Top or A+ is the top. Does F+ allow you to pass, or just pisses off the student.
We have Percentages... What percentage is passing... 50% 60% 65%?
Do you round up or round down?
How about weighted graded? Some grades count for more then other grades.
We got the Check no Check type of grading.
We have Drop your Lowest Grade.
We got extra credit scores that can boost your grade above maximum...
Don't forget the end of the semester Mom Yelling at the teacher and principal to turn that F to a C grade.
How about the ability to scan the paper back into the system so there is a full audit, to prove to Angry Mom, that her kid is an idiot.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
At the recommendation of another comment, I just watched the demo video for jupitersis. I was horrified. One unified solution for students, teachers, and parents to check grades, assignments, discipline, schedules, and more.
My objection is that there is something to be learned from the good old fashioned way. Students need to learn to write down or remember their assignments and keep track of how they're doing in class by themselves. Maybe that means a motivated student will build his own gradebook. Maybe that means other students will learn to manage a planner. And maybe other less dull students will develop a memory inside their brains. Whatever the means is, this classic exercise of remembering grades and assignments is a cornerstone of childhood education.
And then there's the discipline issue. A screenshot in that demo video showed a nice citation webpage with checkboxes like "[x] gum/food [x] violence [x] talking". This bureaucratic approach only serves to depersonalize discipline and prematurely convert youthful chaps into the office drones that many will become. When students act up, parents and teachers should be aware of it on a personal level, and monitor for any deeper issues that can be dealt with sensitively.
The discipline chart also had boxes for "[x] email parents [x] notify parents on login [ ] notify dean". The automation of informing parents is frighting. There's something to be said about the not knowing if the parents know, when a student gets in trouble at school. There is a healthy guilt associated with it, that can translate into a productive dinner table conversation. It also educates the student's human sensibilities -- he learns to gauge who is likely to inform whom, and at what time, and become sensitive to all the small human factors that make the world go round.
If anything, "solutions" like jupitersis only serve to raise children for a 21st century bureaucratic totalitarian society, which even if this is the state of the world, children should at least have their childhood.
As for the question in TFA, which I believe was about how teachers should manage their grades, each teacher should manage it by themselves. No need to subject teachers to any more needling paperwork. Some teachers like old fashion grade books with the nice rows and columns. Other teachers are Excel aficionados. Let the teacher do what's most organic to his or her teaching style.
Moral of the story: technology is not the solution to childhood education.
ZX2C4
It was.
It was posted by an AC, and by default most people browse at 2, so it was easy to overlook. I didn't see it when I posted my response earlier either.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
This was asked by someone in 2004 and the comments in reply had a number of suggestions:
http://kairosnews.org/node/3873
This was basically what we did in my CS101 and 102 classes: code up a system to store student records and class grades in C++. Students are objects! Put them in a vector! Put them in a list! Make your own list container class! (No, I am not seriously suggesting you use that software, of course...)
By storing the grade information of your pupils in the cloud, you will be able to leverage the synergies that are generated when this valuable demographic data is mined to maximize educational targets.
After using a SAAS provider you can deploy a multi-functional framework that is based on best practices and LEAN methodogies. For instance, the Slashdot moderation system could be used to have a peer-review mechanism for student performance which would provide one of the metrix in a three-dimensional rating matrix.
Only by crowdsourcing the innovation available in social network can achieve the desired paradigm shift that your instititution despererately seeks,
Which is nice.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Your school employer has tasked you with determining an appropriate system for managing student grades and producing report cards. You take that task and the first thing you do is try to find an open source solution? Why? Why is your first step to limit your choices? Perhaps you are looking at proprietary solutions as well, but your post is incredibly short on details and the phrasing of the question does not imply you have done so.
For a program that is going to affect every teacher, administrator, student, and parent I hope you are considering all options. If a problem pops up, you are fully responsible. Parents will be vocal if somehow the report cards get flubbed. If the teachers find the program clunky or difficult to use, they will definitely make your job difficult.
Look, there may be an ideal FOSS system out there for your needs. I just find the notion of limiting yourself to only FOSS systems to be incredibly short sighted and narrow minded. At least let the companies that offer those systems wine & dine you a bit before making a more informed decision.
We use Moodle in all of our schools (Saanich School District) and teachers sometimes use the gradebook function. British Columbia currently utilizes an enterprise commercial system which has been bought out and being depreciated. As most of the commercial offerings are, ... well commercial, also filled with bloat, are vendor-centric and cannot react to a school or districts ever changing needs and requirements - we have spawned a new student information system called openStudent. It is based on the Education Community Source license and will fulfil the needs and requirements of British Columbia districts and schools (it will include all of the funcationality teaches require such as attendance, assessment tools and so forth).
We are approximately 30% complete at our current velocity and should have the core program completed by January 2013. The softare is being designed as enterprise-based, meaning it would function on a state-wide or province-wide basis - the only software of its type that we are aware of.
Something of interest for the future to other jurisdictions.
Several people have rushed to suggest Moodle as the obvious solution to this problem. I have two distinct and largely independent concerns about such answers.
First and foremost, it is unclear to me that the proper solution to this sort of problem must be a monolithic, integrated and gigantic learning management system. The submitter indeed wonders about specific tools, so suggesting something like Moodle is at least a helpful pointer, yet there isn’t necessarily any indication that a comprehensive tool is the proper solution to the problem. If all that's required is a tool for calculating grades and generating report cards, then the proper solution, following our beloved UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it right, should not be a tool that calculates grades, generates report cards, manages teams, permits file uploads, hosts discussion forums, sends notifications through e-mail, etc, all for any number of courses in which registered users enrol. Such a system could happen to be desirable, of course, but the scope of the question becomes a major concern. The benefits of such a system, if indeed they exist, must of course come when applied to solve problems that fall within the scope of their design: one grand unified system to manage all of the institution's academic information processes.
A greater question is whether such a system is ever a good idea, even when much more is desired than a substitute for spreadsheets. I believe our experience (information technicians as most of us are) with opaque, monolithic systems is quite telling in this regard: it's probably a bad idea, and it's probably better to decouple the bits of the problem as much as possible within the constraints of simplicity imposed by a non-technical user base.
My second concern is more specific and perhaps less important. I’ve had some experience using Moodle itself to manage an undergraduate CS course, and it has been less than pleasant. It certainly takes a stab at a great variety of problems: managing user registration for students and instructors, enrolment in multiple courses, discussion forums, e-mail notifications, student teams, time-limited file uploads for turning in assignments, grading, and so on. Most unsurprisingly, though, its solutions are actually rather poor, at least on the version I happened to work with.
Grades, for whatever reason, are necessarily discrete, simple integers. The student and group information interface does not provide comfortable listings or tables; instead, information is split across multiple pages, one for each student or group, with links to assignments they've turned in and the like. Unfortunately, opening those pages seems to be a stateful action, so if, say, you happen to open the pages for a dozen students in background tabs hoping to download each of their solutions to programming assignments or anything of the sort, by the time the last one loads, the rest are invalidated; you actually have to crawl them one by one. This is only an example, of course, of a pattern present in nearly every function Moodle implements. It's extremely uncomfortable.
Moodle is generally ill-suited for any sort of non-trivial use, and programmatic interaction with it is extremely impractical. Querying its database directly isn't too helpful, as it's full of implementation artefacts and redundant data, and the regular interface relies heavily on the assumption that the user will only ever use it within a Web browser, one page at a time. These concerns may not be too important in the context of a high school whose instructors are unlikely to have the technical skills to try any form of automatic interaction with the system, but the fact that it is even desirable says much of its shortcomings.
I do note that I haven't checked whether the version of Moodle I worked with is up-to-date, and it may well be that these issues have long been resolved.
Interaction with spreadsheets is far more comfortable. Non-technical users are typically already familiar w
[Note: I forgot to log in and posted this AC. I'm not sure if reposting as my user is compatible with Slashdot netiquette canon, but this makes it easier to keep track of replies, so pardon the noise.] Several people have rushed to suggest Moodle as the obvious solution to this problem. I have two distinct and largely independent concerns about such answers. First and foremost, it is unclear to me that the proper solution to this sort of problem must be a monolithic, integrated and gigantic learning management system. The submitter indeed wonders about specific tools, so suggesting something like Moodle is at least a helpful pointer, yet there isn’t necessarily any indication that a comprehensive tool is the proper solution to the problem. If all that's required is a tool for calculating grades and generating report cards, then the proper solution, following our beloved UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it right, should not be a tool that calculates grades, generates report cards, manages teams, permits file uploads, hosts discussion forums, sends notifications through e-mail, etc, all for any number of courses in which registered users enrol. Such a system could happen to be desirable, of course, but the scope of the question becomes a major concern. The benefits of such a system, if indeed they exist, must of course come when applied to solve problems that fall within the scope of their design: one grand unified system to manage all of the institution's academic information processes. A greater question is whether such a system is ever a good idea, even when much more is desired than a substitute for spreadsheets. I believe our experience (information technicians as most of us are) with opaque, monolithic systems is quite telling in this regard: it's probably a bad idea, and it's probably better to decouple the bits of the problem as much as possible within the constraints of simplicity imposed by a non-technical user base. My second concern is more specific and perhaps less important. I’ve had some experience using Moodle itself to manage an undergraduate CS course, and it has been less than pleasant. It certainly takes a stab at a great variety of problems: managing user registration for students and instructors, enrolment in multiple courses, discussion forums, e-mail notifications, student teams, time-limited file uploads for turning in assignments, grading, and so on. Most unsurprisingly, though, its solutions are actually rather poor, at least on the version I happened to work with. Grades, for whatever reason, are necessarily discrete, simple integers. The student and group information interface does not provide comfortable listings or tables; instead, information is split across multiple pages, one for each student or group, with links to assignments they've turned in and the like. Unfortunately, opening those pages seems to be a stateful action, so if, say, you happen to open the pages for a dozen students in background tabs hoping to download each of their solutions to programming assignments or anything of the sort, by the time the last one loads, the rest are invalidated; you actually have to crawl them one by one. This is only an example, of course, of a pattern present in nearly every function Moodle implements. It's extremely uncomfortable. Moodle is generally ill-suited for any sort of non-trivial use, and programmatic interaction with it is extremely impractical. Querying its database directly isn't too helpful, as it's full of implementation artefacts and redundant data, and the regular interface relies heavily on the assumption that the user will only ever use it within a Web browser, one page at a time. These concerns may not be too important in the context of a high school whose instructors are unlikely to have the technical skills to try any form of automatic interaction with the system, but the fact that it is even desirable says much of its shortcomings. I do note that I haven't checked whether the version of Moodle I worked with is up-to-date, and it may well be t
I would strongly recommend looking at the "products" or modules for/with Plone Web Content Management Systems (WCMS).
http://plone.org/products?getCategories=educational&getCompatibility=any
Not only are those prgorams world class - developed for and by educators at various educational institutions - major European and US Ivy League Universities, but also at middle/high schools and research centers. They interoperate with Moodle school administration software as well.
They can be implemented in an "intranet" or via school extranet website, have enviable security and reliability records and are continually supported by the Python PyPi organization.
wanderson@nac.net
I've been looking in to this for years. First off, there is no "good" open source grade book that isn't overkill or underkill. Open source grade books fall into two categories. The first type are for single teacher use. They have a shitty interface, in that they don't use a spreadsheet style and limited methods. Many don't make report cards and the like. Others are overkill in that they are part of a larger package (like open admin) that is a pain to install for a single teacher usage. Many others provide things like emailing grades to parents, attendance, making web page reports, and other crap which is problematic when dealing with school districts. There are plenty of good closed source grade books (free ones) that were originally commercial products. Most of these vendors realized that there wasn't any money in it. Districts tend to go with larger packages like "Power School" and others made by text book publishers and the like. For a while, I used TabC Grade Book (which is in java and open source). It was a programming project for a college class and was pretty flexible. It had reporting features that could be worked with, but required a (for pay) java library for some of its operations, but could work without it. After a while, I took the time to construct a well made Open Office spreadsheet grade book that was flexible and simple to set up and use. I wrote macros to output grade reporting (like report cards) in a variety of formats. Setting up the grade book to interface with the OO database makes for nice pretty formatting.
Now, it wasn't mentioned in what context this would be used. If you only need a "one off", go with a commercial "free" grade book. No one will be the wiser. If it is a single school thing, use a web based grade book, there are plenty of free/low cost ones. In my experience, most teachers are pretty simple minded when it comes to grade book software. Most don't read manuals or don't actually spend any time figuring anything out when it comes to computing. They are the first to throw up their hands and say, "I can't use this." Amazing considering, they are supposed to educated and interested in learning.
Lastly, you would be surprised how much easier working with an "old fashioned" paper grade book is. I go to a local store and get a small multi-column accounting book. Do it all with pencil. If a student or a parent needs grade information, you don't have to fire up some electronics. All of the information is right there. It is also highly portable and works across all operating systems (people). Filling out grades on paper report cards is an extremely quick process. Most people are unaware of how much time working with software can use or how quickly writing something down can be done. I tried it for a year, the efficiency was terrific. At the end of the day, I was done at the end of the day.
My wife and I are looking at https://www.learnboost.com/dashboard from google for keeping track of our kids grades. We home school them.
How difficult can it be to find such a thing? I wrote one for my high school when I was a student back in 1983, in Applesoft Basic. No, I didn't leave a backdoor in it to give myself all As.
I know when I did high school quite a while ago, we had a Comp Sci course. I have to assume that's still present in most high schools, so why not offer it up as course credit to some of those students to write this for you? We're just talking a basic web frontend, DB on the backend, with some nice PDF output for printing the cards. And of course a qualified code audit to make sure there aren't any lurking "special grades" functions added in if you know how to call it, backdoors, etc.
It would be a cool PR piece to say that your school's grades, etc are managed by a system that the students themselves wrote. And what you've described is very basic, well within the reaches of HS-level programming.
http://schooltool.org/
From their features page:
Teacher Gradebooks
* Use SchoolTool’s gradebook for calculating point or percentage based grades. .xls spreadsheet format.
* SchoolTool provides a spreadsheet-style gradebook for each class section.
* Each gradebook can be organized as multiple worksheets.
* Assignments and activities can be organized and weighted by categories, such as “Exam” or “Lab,” which can be customized for each site.
* Point-based scores can be converted to grades using flexible, customizable “score systems.’
* Scores are viewable by students, if they are given permission to log into SchoolTool.
* Scores can be exported to
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
Moodle is nice. And free. But how are you going to pay for the web host to run it, and the software developer to install, configure and maintain it to meet your needs?
For $1.50 per student per month you can use a cloud-based tool like quickschools.com to track attendance, homework, grades, report cards, transcripts and more. And you can start tomorrow, not after a 6-month project development cycle has passed.
Sure, Moodle can do much more than that, but for the features you are asking for, no Moodle implementation will cost less than $1.50 per student per month and be ready to use tomorrow.
Well, you are in a high school, so why not find some kid to setup WAMP, configure the database, and write you some web pages for entering in the grades. Seems like a simple and mostly free solution to me. Just be sure the kid you get to code it, can be trusted...wouldn't want anyone slipping in and changing grades now would we ;-)
Just a thought....
There have been plenty of recommendations for Moodle, but just to throw it out there... it's not open source, but GradeConnect is a hosted course management system and is designed to do exactly what you're looking for (and a whole lot more) and has a free version. I used to do some development work for GradeConnect 6+ years ago, so I know the folks who run it and they're all educators. It really is a system designed by teachers, for teachers. Worth checking out at least!
http://www.gradeconnect.com/
open source, written in ruby - very slick UI - it's best feature is the speed grader - http://www.instructure.com/
While it is *not* an online grade book and will *not* print report cards (though that could easily be added), if you just want to display student grades online for students/parents to review then you should consider OnlineGrades at http://www.onlinegrades.org/ . It is PHP + MySQL and the price is right. It takes exports from several standard grade book software programs.
Also, it should be noted that you can disable most features in Moodle, making it just a grade calculator. For example just disable the blogs, tags, and all the activities except the assignment. Now you can use the "offline activity assignment" for grading students, and publish the grades to the students, and/or exporting the grades to the student information system. The moodle.org forums are very helpful, I recommend you ask for help there. Somebody has probably come up with something quite like this before.