ESE Grade Handler

Introduction

This is a set of tools that attempt to simplify a number of tasks that involve grades from students. Compared to earlier versions, the User Interface of this tool should now be slightly more intuitive.

When using this tool, data never leaves your computer. All data processing in this tool is performed within your web-browser, and no data is transmitted over the internet.

Currently, the following tools are provided:

• Combine Results: allows you to combine multiple data sources (Ans, Canvas, custom, last years grades) into a single master spreadsheet. This makes it easy to compute customized final grades and prevents you from having to use any advanced Excel-lookup wizardry for different common data sources. This step can be skipped if your course result is based on a single grade (e.g. final exam).
• Prepare Official: take a spreadsheet with final course grades (exported from Ans or Canvas, or your own master spreadsheet) and inject the final course results into a spreadsheet exported from Osiris or provided by the secretariat. Also allows you to include attendance data from sin-online (Academy Attendance is still work in progress). All important steps perform useful sanity checks and make sure the final course results are in compliance with school rules.
• Prepare Attendance: take a spreadsheet attendance data from Academy Attendance and inject the attendance results into an official Osiris spreadsheet. The minimum number of sessions required to pass attendance can be adjusted.
• Grade Changes: a tool that can be used to prepare relevant documents to change grades, after a spreadsheet with grades was earlier submitted to Osiris. Requires that you have a copy of an Osiris spreadsheet with the last submitted grades.

How does it work

For this tool to be able to use your spreadsheet files, they must have a certain structure. Sheets or Tabs that do not have this structure will be ignored.

• A sheet with results must have a table that starts in cell A1 with a header in row A (the first row) and data starting at row B (the second row). Sheets with two header rows, for example as they are exported by Canvas, are not supported; you are advised to just delete additional header rows before you use a spreadsheet in this tool.
• At least one of the columns in a sheet must be a key-column with student identities. A student identity is any piece of text that contains a single erna identity (e.g. 123456ab) somewhere.
• A key column must hold a student identity in every row of the data, and every identity with a column must be unique: if the same student identity occurs twice within a key column, the column is not accepted as a key column.
• If there are multiple key columns, one of them is picked arbitrarily. If there are different key columns that have conflicting student identities, you may get unexpected results. It is thus advised to only have a single column with student identities. Currently, there is no check in place to warn you against these types of scenarios, although this may be added in the future.

Attendance Data (new)

The new way to deal with attendance data is to export it from Academy Attendance and use this as a partial course result in Osiris. The Prepare Attendance tool can be used for this specific process. Support for attendance data was removed from the other tools.

Is this safe?

All processing of grades happens solely within your web-browser, and no data is transmitted over the internet by this tool. Once this website is loaded in your browser, you can disconnect from the internet to handle your grades offline. If you don't believe this, you can easily check this with the network activity inspector in your browser's developer tools, or by inspecting the source code of this application (it is a bit ugly and copy-pasty).

I need feature X or feature Y is not working for me, can you do something about it?

My main motivation to build this is for my own work as a teacher, and I do not have time to provide support. I built this in less than 10 hours, mostly to make my own life in handling grades easier. If you want to discuss something, you contact me, or even raise an issue on Github. However, I do not make any promises I can do something about it. I also do not have to give basic user support, and I hope the tool is mostly self-explanatory so that it is not needed.

Some other schools have dedicated programmers whose main task is to build this kind of software that saves researchers and teachers valuable time. The fastest way to get the features you want might be to find a developer who can contribute the feature you need to this project, or who writes a separate tool. This an MIT-licensed open source tool, and useful contributions are welcome.