|
|
|
The electronic practical submission system currently most widely used in the School is submit. Students use the submit command to submit their work for a practical. This command is fully documented on the manpage (do man submit on a DICE machine) and is not covered here - this guide is for those users that need to access the submitted work.
Anyone who needs to access submitted work must be a member of the submit UNIX group. Most academic staff will already be a member of this group, but often MSc's and PhD's which are doing demonstrating and marking for a course are not. In order to be added to this group contact support.
The submit system manages practical submissions based entirely on data held in Theon (the School Database). This includes such things as the course and individual exercises for the course. It can also include tutorial groups (often submissions are grouped into directories based on tutorial group so it is easier for individual tutors to pick up the exercises they need to mark). Before you can use the submit system for your course you need to make sure the ITO has all the necessary data and it is uptodate, to do this contact the ITO.
One exception to this is the acceptable file names for submitted work. This ensures that when a submission is made only files that match certain names can be submitted. This again makes it easier for exercises to be picked up and collated for marking. You don't need to assign specific names but if you do you should use the command set_submit_file_names which is fully documented in the corresponding manpage (man set_submit_file_names on a DICE machine). To use this command you must be a member of the cvs_submit UNIX group. In order to be added to this group contact support.
All submitted work is held in the /home/submit/submissions directory. The sub-directories within this are structured as follows: COURSE/GROUP/UUN/EXERCISE where COURSE is the course acronym such as inf1-cl or iar, GROUP is the tutorial group name or default if no tutorial groups have been setup by the ITO for the course, UUN is the username of the user making the submission (in the case of students sMATRIC) and EXERCISE is the short exercise code for the piece of work for a course. Within the EXERCISE will be the submitted files (or directories) for the student.
To collect the submissions for marking you can simply use normal UNIX commands to copy or print the work from the appropriate course directories as described above. To make this easier however there is a command called process_submissions which is fully documented in the corresponding manpage (man process_submissions on a DICE machine). This allows you to carry out a configurable operation on all submitted files matching certain criteria (such as from a particular tutor group or user or matching a given filename). By default process_submissions prints all the submitted exercises meeting the criteria but you can specify any UNIX command string. Some examples of using this command are given below.
Students should in general know how to use the submit command to submit their coursework, however it may be helpful to give examples for your particular course (like the names of exercises). For example:
It is advisable to either enforce the submitted filename to have no spaces within it (using set_submit_file_names described above) or just reccommend students avoid this as it can complicate the post processing (extra quoting is required).
The submit command and all the other scripts mentioned in this document are installed on all DICE desktops and also multiuser remote login and compute servers.
|
Please contact us with any
comments or corrections.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright The University of Edinburgh |
|
