Handling Student Rosters - issues to address about abc-classroom

[lwasser]

@kcranston this is the student roster issue that we will need to address when you are implementing the feedback piece and for grading.

[kcranston]

Exporting the roster from GitHub Classroom gives the following columns (where name is not always present in each row):

"identifier","github_username","github_id","name"

While the nbgrader import format has the following columns (only id is required, all others optional):

"id", "first_name","last_name","email","lms_user_id"

The obvious mismatch is that id != identifier but it is slightly more complicated:

• the contents of the identifier columns in the github roster is not consistent. Based on three different classrooms, I see 'Firstname, Lastname', email address, and github username as the identifier (and sometimes differences between rows in the roster for the same class)
• what we really want to match is nbgrader id with github github_username - consistently using github usernames as the identifer in the abc code ensures that we accurately match the downloaded repository with the nbgrader subdirectories.

The simplest thing for nbgrader integration might be to have an abc-classroom script for validating the roster and (optionally) reformatting to what nbgrader expects (which would simply be adding an id column that contains the github username.

Currently, abc-classroom only requires that the roster contains a github_username column.

[lwasser]

yes totally! i spent some time working on the roster for my class... i suspect we can easily write a little helper in the utils module to clean up a roster for nbgrader! then you just add it to the databse and it makes it much easier to grade as you have a student name + github id in the formgrader interface!

[kcranston]

Question - in your current workflow, where do you get the student first name and last name and how do they get into the roster? Do you download that list from some other system? and then input the names manually into the roster?

Edited: This question assumed that you wanted first name, last name in the roster. If this is not necessary, then let me know.

[kcranston]

We discussed this on a call, but I forgot to update the issue. The first name and last name come from the GitHub Classroom roster name column (if the student has added their name to their GitHub profile). So, the roster utility can do a simple split on the first whitespace in the name column to create the first and last columns. There might be some manual cleanup required, but this would be a good first pass that works in the majority of cases.

Having the first name and last name is really handy for nbgrader so that you don't have to recognize github usernames that bear no relation to the student name!

[kcranston]

Question for @lwasser : If a row in the input roster does not contain a github username, do you want to:

1. Include that row to the output roster
2. Skip printing that row for the output roster

(For example, when you download the Github Classroom roster for the ea-python-spring-2021-abc class, there are rows for "Leah Wasser" and "Test Student", but those rows only contain information in the identifier column).

[nkorinek]

@lwasser this issue can be closed I believe!