Remark Script

The Remark multiple choice system exports an extremely wide spreadsheet. This script ingests a CSV-based version of the complete marking output (answers.csv) and compares each row against a rubric spreadsheet (rubric.csv).

Preparation

Make sure there are no extra columns in answers.csv or rubric.csv. This often happens if the grade sheet had extra entries that were not used for an exam. Ensure the structure of answers.csv is one-row-per-student. The first column of this sheet should be student numbers, the second column should be exam version (typically ignored), and each subsequent column should correspond to an exam question.

In grades.py:

• Set your values for right, wrong, and blank. (2, -1, 0 is common, as is 1, 0, 0).

• Determine your question groups; these are mainly useful if you have meta questions that you do not want negative scores to flow across (e.g., Q1-Q5 might be all answers for question A, so you would enter [1,5]). If you do not have negative values you can just enter the numeric values according to [1,NumQuestions].

• Enter a list of free questions if you determine a question should be just marked as correct for all students.

Execution

To invoke the script, simply call the student spreadsheet answers.csv and your answer key rubric.csv and run python grade.py. This will emit several other spreadsheets, along with a plethora of debug information on the console.

Analysis

• results.csv contains the exam grades.

• individualgrades.csv can be used to generate per-question statistics for an exam. For example, you could add a formula row across all columns that contains XXX; this would give you the class percentage on each question (% that got it right out of the class, this ignores any penalties etc). You can also verify your freebies by making sure the cells in the freebie columns are only right.

• questionmarks.csv contains the scores for the grouped questions.

Tips

• Restructuring all-that-apply multiple choice questions into true/false is often easiest to reason about and is the way this script has been used.

• Adding a row to answers.csv that is 100% correct, and another that is 100% incorrect can be a good way to do a sanity check on your rubric.csv.