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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.
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
...prepare yourself to be hated by every one of your co-workers.
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
engrade.com is free. They make money from buying customer support and added features.
I can recommend www.pun.net, partly because a friend of mine is lead dev.
There is no music - home taping killed it.
SIS2000 is pretty good and open-ended. Our district only ditched it because the teachers union wanted Powerschool back. Primarily because it had an Apple logo on it, and teachers being left-wing socialists, they naturally loved that.
The joke was on them, because during our SIS2000 years, Pearson bought Powerschool. Then we had a couple years of teachers bitching that Powerschool was missing features that SIS2000 had.
Oh, and the pricetag. If you don't agree with spending over 1 million dollars on Powerschool it's obviously because you hate children.
THL phish sticks
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.
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
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.
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/
Are you recommending OpenGrade, then?
To you and the others who imply "You must be incompetent because you could have just Googled it..." I'm guessing the OP actually DID google it, and was hoping that slashdot might be more useful than a simple google search.
... 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
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
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|"
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$ yes f | ./markWork.sh
This is Slashdot, where the general motto is "Assume stupidity". ;)
I can only guess at the reason why you didn't know this
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Hi, /. community whose broad experiences may go further in depth than I am able to go with the time I have been given to find a solution.
I have a job to do and although I've come up with some solutions on my own, I would like to tap into the wider experience of the
In addition, I would like to start a conversation that may be of interest or future use to other people, as they may currently have or in the future have the same problem that I have right now.
Which of course is invariably followed by a couple responses like yours.
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
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.
I used to teach at a local community college
so I could show them how well their doing
ouch
[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
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