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

kgrader was developed using Ruby 2.2, though it should work with any recent version of Ruby.

Install dependencies with gem:

gem install nokogiri ruby-progressbar

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 enable superscoring as well, which will re-run tests that a student failed in an attempt to see if they can get a higher grade:

rake grade cs123 mp1 superscore=yes

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