GradeWatch grades database format

Table of contents

About GradeWatch
Grades database
Specific file format
Updating grades for posting

About GradeWatch

GradeWatch is an intranet software package, which utilizes a web server to display students' grades. The only user side software required is an Internet browser capable of displaying HTML tables. Netscape Navigator 3.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 would do. Refer to the owner's reference for server's requirements. The login screen is generated by the package and consists of the course name, user name and password. After successful login student will see a table with information corresponding to his or her grades and common area corresponding to the course grade statistics. Instructor has access to each student grades, all students grades at once, can e-mail grades to one student or all of them, generate a mailing list from the roster, and access the software usage log for the particular course. All of that with one single power user password that can be set separately for each course. Please read the user's manual for more information on using the database and owner's manual for more information on installing the software package.

Grades database

Creating or updating database is a simple process if certain rules are followed. The original developers' intention was to create something, which is quick to use, and does not take too much time to develop as well. To avoid entering data multiple times the Excel (or any other spreadsheet) file is utilized as a database. Each course has its own database file. However, to simplify the package and make it independent from any particular spreadsheet (especially Microsoft products which change the file format with each version) a tab delimited text file exported from your favorite software package is used.
Because such a text file does not contain all the information which is stored  in the original file two restrictions apply
  • the file must have some extra formatting information marking general information about the course such as column names, extra statistical information (maximum and minimum number of points) etc.
  • the file must be stored both in your favorite software package format and tab delimited text because all automatic formulas you entered into your spreadsheet are lost when the file is exported into text format.
Usually once a database is created it can be copied into new files and quickly adapted for new courses. A sample database was created using Microsoft Excel 97. You can download the binary file or look at its image in GIF format. You can also inspect quickly the database file shown as a table resulting report for a  student and instructor's report. You may also look at all three tables at once.

Specific file format

Minimal Database Example - GIF Image
After looking at the sample database file it can be determined that there are several important keywords which corresponds to the specific information in the grade report. These keywords start with tilde ~ and are ~header, ~points, ~average, ~median, ~min, and ~max. The GradeWatch searches the text data file against these words and picks data from the appropriate lines. In the future releases of this software all words found in the second column starting with tilde will be taken into account and the corresponding rows displayed on the grade report.
Each student entry starts with the student's password in the first column and student's name in the second column. The last column with grade data is followed by ~!~ and by optional e-mail address. Lines not mentioned in the previous paragraph and not having ~!~ are skipped, and can be used for comments or additional spreadsheet calculations.

Updating grades for posting

Each time you modify the grades using your favorite spreadsheet you need to perform some extra work. After saving your data file as you usually would save it you need to save it once again as a tab delimited text file. Export it always to the same location which you specified in the GradeWatch configuration file and then make habit of immediately closing it to prevent re-saving it once again as the original database file with possible (I do not know your software) loss of some spreadsheet specific information.
In other words the process of updating grades may be summarized as follows.
  • Load your spreadsheet file into your favorite spreadsheet editor
  • Update your records
  • Save your spreadsheet
  • Save your spreadsheet once again as a tab-delimited text file into particular location
    • That location and a file name should be listed in the configuration file which you edit once each time you add a new course to the GradeWatch
  • Close your spreadsheet editor to avoid losing data format
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