kgrader/README.md

kgrader

kgrader is a code autograder, originally created by the course staff of CS 296-41 (Systems Programming Honors) at the University of Illinois to grade student homework submissions.

It is written in Ruby.

Installation

Download kgrader over git:

git clone https://github.com/earwig/kgrader.git kgrader
cd kgrader

If you want to use UIUC-specific assignment specifications (requires special permissions, but you have those if you want to grade our assignments, right?):

git submodule update --init

Usage

kgrader uses rake as its command-line interface.

Setup

To show all known classes, semesters, and assignments:

rake list

To load a roster (a newline-delimited list of student identifiers) for the current semester of a particular course (e.g. “cs123”):

rake roster cs123 myroster.csv

You can also specify the semester:

rake roster cs123 myroster.csv sp16

Grading

To grade a particular assignment (e.g., “mp1” for “cs123”):

rake grade cs123 mp1

After verifying that everything looks good, push the grade reports with:

rake commit cs123 mp1

Housekeeping

To do some basic cleanup (i.e., trash uncommitted grading attempts, or reset messy internal state after a bad run):

rake clean

To restore kgrader to its “factory defaults” (i.e., everything clean does, but also delete checked-out student repos and roster files -- dangerous!):

rake clobber

Advanced

grade has an extended syntax for different options.

To specify the semester, instead of the inferred current one:

rake grade cs123 mp1 semester=sp16

To set a cutoff date after which commits will be ignored:

rake grade cs123 mp1 due="March 20, 2016 11:59:59 PM CDT"

To grade without fetching new student repo changes:

rake grade cs123 mp1 fetch=no

To grade specific students only:

rake grade cs123 mp1 students=ksmith12
rake grade cs123 mp1 students=ksmith12,bcooper3,mjones14

Normally, kgrader will only regrade a particular student’s assignment if their repo has changed since the last run. To forcibly regrade:

rake grade cs123 mp1 regrade=yes

You can combine these arguments in any meaningful way. semester and students are also available options for commit.