Month: June 2014

Goals and Proposal

Goals

See also the original project descriptor.

  • MSc submission to be the same as UG4 is now, hence to include project materials archive and “handling” flags.
  • Webmark mark return PDFs to be accessible alongside the project PDF and materials.
  • Provide a simple master index page of the current sessions projects with links to the report PDF, materials and showing the project marks (1st marker mark, 2nd marker mark, agreed mark and moderator mark) each with link to actual corresponding Webmark return PDF. The index page should include student name, UUN and project title. It should be sortable by any column, but particularly mark columns.
  • All to be directly accessible to external examiners, however authentication does not need to be constrained down to specific examiner access per-project, controlled access to any is sufficient.
  • Projects of MSc students awarded distinctions (where student has gained a distinction overall) to be published openly. Projects of UG4 students where the projects final mark (as appropriately calculated) is at a distinction grade level to be published openly. In both cases this is however only if the “handling” flags do not indicate that the project was submitted for assessment only.

Proposal for Access to Submissions for Markers

We will create two new project websites. Access will be limited by default to current staff (as is the case for the current project area: www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/projsubs) and external examiners, e.g.

www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/ug4projects
www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/mscprojects

External examiners will need to obtain an iFriend account which can then be given access to either or both of these areas. Given the small numbers of accounts likely to be involved this process will not be automated – each new iFriend account will require frontline support to make a small configuration change to the ACLs for these URLs for each session.

We already have two indexing scripts which work well (provide access to each students projects PDF, materials and “handling” flags for UG4, and could also do the same for MSC, see below). We propose modifying these to also act as the index page generator for each area above:

  1. Modify “submission_links_common.cgi” so that by optional argument only the most recent submission by each student (by reference to the submission date and time held in the “record” file in the “upload” directory) is listed.
  2. Modify “submission_links_common.cgi” so that by optional argument it will also display per student submission the 1st marker mark, 2nd marker mark, agreed mark and moderator mark. These will have been made available in the “upload” directory (see Webmark Returns proposal below). This option should also include a “COALESCE(moderated,agreed)” and “ABS(1stmark-2ndmark)” calculated column. The four raw marks will be links to each of the four possible Webmark PDF returns from markers (1st, 2nd, Agreed and Moderator) for that students project. These will have been copied into the “upload” directory (see Webmark Returns proposal below).
  3. Modify “submission_links_common.cgi” so that by optional argument the “handling” flags are not shown (these are not relevant to the marking process itself nor do external examiners need to see them).
  4. Modify “submission_links_common.cgi” so that the generated index page includes per-column sort functionality.
  5. Make “submission_links_ug4.cgi” act as “index.html” for “teaching/ug4projects”.
  6. Make “submission_links_msc.cgi” act as “index.html” for “teaching/mscprojects”.

Proposal for Submissions

We already have a submission form for UG4 which works well and does everything we need. The MSc submission form while using similar technology does not collect project materials or the “handling” flags. We propose dropping the current MSc submission form and using a straight clone of the UG4 process.

  1. Copy “submission_form_ug4.pl” to “submission_form_msc.pl”.
  2. Factor out common code in “submission_form_ug4.pl” and “submission_form_msc.pl” into “submission_form_common.pl”. The only effective differences between them are the final “upload” directory path (which will be either “ROOT/ug4projects” as at the moment or “ROOT/mscprojects” for the new MSc version, in place of “ROOT/infthesis” where the MSc submissions are currently held) and a few tags which need to be either UG4 or MSC respectively.  Action script will be either the existing UG4 one or the new MSc one (see next item).
  3. Copy “accept-ug4.pl” (which is the “submit” action of the current “submission_form_ug4.pl”) to “accept_msc.pl”.
  4. Factor out common code in “accept_ug4.pl” and “accept_msc.pl” into “accept_common.pl”. Again the only effective differences are the final “upload” directory path and a few tags.

As before these will create a unique directory per-submission. This will contain the project report PDF, the project materials archive file and a “record” file which has relevant metadata – the students name, matriculation number, “handling” flags, date and time of submission. To put the new mechanism in place:

  1.  Update existing references to UG4 and MSc project submission to use the new scripts above.
  2.  Make sure that “submission_form_thesis.pl” (previously used for MSc project submission) and links to it are marked for PhD Thesis submission only (I am not sure if this mechanism is still used for PhD submission, if not this could just be deleted).

Proposal for Webmark Returns

For various reasons it would be tricky to get Webmark to write its internal copy of the submitted 1st, 2nd, Agreed and Moderator mark forms directly into the “upload” directory. So to achieve this instead we propose the following.

  1. Modify the Webmark config for the project marking forms so a “copy” of the generated PDF (as sent to the marker) is sent into the corresponding students project submission “upload” directory. This will be done by adding a “Cc” to the Webmark email that is to an alias address, e.g. “wm-projmark@inf.ed.ac.uk”. The alias will be defined as a pipe to a “remctl” script on the Webmark server itself (which already has access to the student submission “upload” directories via NFS under an AMD mountpoint). The “remctl” script will strip the PDF attachment from the email and copy it into the most recent submission directory for the corresponding student. The directory matching will be done by reference to the students matriculation number which will be included in the Webmark generated PDF attachment filename and the students matriculation number held in the “record” file in the submission “upload” directory. This will require changing the generated attachment name in Webmark so this additional data is put into the filename. The Webmark PDF attachments will be stored with fixed/known names in the relevant “upload” directory (e.g. 1st.pdf, 2nd.pdf, Agreed.pdf and Moderator.pdf) so that the indexing script needs no additional intelligence to provide links to them.
  2. Also modify the Webmark config so that an additional (hidden) output is produced from the entered form data containing the actual mark awarded. As in item 1 above this will be pushed out via “remctl” script which will identify the appropriate “upload” directory to copy the data into and will be saved into a file with fixed/known name so that the indexing script can include the value as the title text for the link to the actual submitted form PDF.

Proposal for Public Access to Archive of Projects

Part of the submission technology we are continuing to use above includes a notification to the (legacy) School database to collect the submitted papers for further publication (if the “handling” flags give permission and in the case of the MSc that the student in question had been awarded a Distinction). This is currently broken for a few reasons:

  • The “upload” directory path being used by the database scripts seems to be wrong so it is currently looking in the wrong place.
  • The Distinction award is being looked up in the old legacy assessment structures where it is no longer maintained – in fact it was not being maintained in the new system (Theon) either until this session.

It is probably trivial to fix the above – however it is not clear what the long term status of these processes is (being largely tied to the legacy database service) nor what the plan will be with respect to PURE (and integration of reports onto personal pages).

So for now we propose (only for MSc students that got a Distinction Overall and UG4 projects where the final project mark was at a distinction grade level) that there will be a separate public access page, much like the existing “teaching/projsubs” tree, for the published project PDF reports.

The “projsubs” mechanism is basically a cron driven forced processing of the “submission_links_[ug4|msc].cgi” script for multiple sessions to produce a static index page per session of student projects with link (via the cgi) to the actual PDF report and materials, just like the live current session cgi script.

  1. Make a crontab entry derived from that used for “/projsubs” for a new URL, e.g. www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/projects/[ug4|msc]/YYYY.html, where YYYY.html is the relevant session snapshot, 2013.html for this session. Access to this URL tree will be public. This modified crontab entry will use additional arguments to “submission_links_common.cgi” to suitably modify the behaviour (see item 2 and 3 below) and also use the argument to hide “handling” flags (see item 3 in Proposal for Access to Submissions for Markers above).
  2. Modify the “submission_links_common.cgi” script so that by optional argument (given in the crontab entry for this URL) only students that were awarded a distinction and have not indicated in “handling” flags that the project was submitted for assessment only are listed (see item 4 below).
  3. Modify the “submission_links_common.cgi” script so that by optional argument (given in the crontab entry for this URL) each relevant students project PDF file is physically copied into the “teaching/projects” directory tree and that the index points to this rather than via the link script. This means that the public projects contain a separate copy from that held in the “upload” directory (which should be being deleted after the marking process has been completed, or as according to the students preference in the “handling” flags). This also fences access to just the project report PDF and means exposure to any project materials or marking reports will be prevented.
  4. Add a report to Theon that generates a list of MSc student matriculation numbers in each session that were awarded a distinction overall and a list of UG4 student matriculation numbers in each session that achieved a distinction grade for their final project mark. This report will be written into some area that the “submission_links_common.cgi” script can access and will then be used by that script to filter the directory tree of “upload” submissions to make the index a suitable subset (see item 2 above).
  5. Update any links to published projects to refer to the new URL (see item 1).