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1987-11-13
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232 lines
TEACHER'S AIDE: A Gradebook Program Version 1.2
Shareware from Blaine Technologies Nov. 1987
=======================================================================
Philosophy:
It may seem unconventional to begin instructions for a gradebook
program with a discussion of philosophy, but it is a good starting place
nonetheless. Every instructor, every school has its own grading
theories and for the most part, they are as different as they are alike.
There is a philosophy behind Teacher's Aide as well. How
satisfactorily the program works for you will depend on how closely your
philosophy matches. Teacher's Aide was written with the view that a
gradebook program should be simple and quick, that it should not be an
accounting nightmare and that its functions should be obvious.
What Teacher's Aide, will NOT do is provide bell-shaped curves,
complex matrix plots, or intensive test weighting. What Teacher's Aide
WILL do is provide maximum flexibility for grades, along with easy use
and rapid grade entry. After the first time set-up all additional
entries can be made from the numeric keypad.
If you want a complex gradebook program with fancy charts, Teacher's
Aide is not for you. If however, you want to spend your time doing more
important things than figuring grades, Teacher's Aide can trim hours
from that tedious drudgery.
Beginning
To start Teacher's Aide, you'll need the program disk plus as many
blank formatted disks as you have classes or subjects. If you need
directions on how to format a disk, please see your DOS manual. The
blank disks will become your data disks. While more than one class may
be kept on a data disk (especially through the use of subdirectories) we
do not recommend this. If you have all your grades on one disk and it
crashes, you stand to lose a considerable amount of work. A single class
(subject) is much easier to recreate if misfortune strikes.
Each grade stored on disk requires approximately 11 bytes. Thus a
360K disk will handle around 34,000 grades. This should be enough for
most applications. Teacher's Aide has a limit of 38 students per class,
so each student could have approximately 850 grades. Under normal
circumstances, we do not envision either limit presenting a problem.
On request, Blaine Technologies will customize Teacher's Aide to
handle larger class sizes if necessary.
Getting Started
Teacher's Aide was developed under DOS 3.2 and should run earlier
versions with no problems. It requires one disk drive and 128K of
memory. Teacher's Aide does not support a hard drive.
From the A> prompt, insert your program disk and type GRADES. The
program will load and prompt you to insert your data disk. Remove the
program disk and insert your data disk. If this is a new data disk,
Teacher's Aide will ask you for the class name and number of students.
If Teacher's Aide has seen this data disk before, it will tell you the
class name and size.
At that point, the following menu will appear:
Teacher's Aide
A Gradebook Program
Version 1.1
=======================
Class is: English 2
No. of students is: 24
=======================
1. Enter grades
2. Summarize grades
3. Print grades
4. First time set-up
5. Change class
6. Exit
Which?
(Obviously, the class name would be what you have entered along with
the number of students.) If this is a new data disk (or the first time
you use the program) you should type 4 to begin the first-time set up.
Even though the program attempts to prevent such an error from
happening, given the right circumstances, it may be feasible to crash
the program by attempting to enter, summarize or print grades without a
prepared data disk.
First time set up
You need to set up every data disk. After selecting 4 from the main
menu, the computer will ask you to enter student names one at a time.
Students can be entered in any sequence, although we'd suggest
alphabetical order. The order in which you enter the student names is
the sequence the program will use.
The program already knows how many students you have and will prompt
you the appropriate number of times.
Should you make a mistake entering a name, all is not lost. Errors
can be corrected from the DOS prompt. (More on this later in the
Correcting Errors section.)
Enter grades
Teacher's Aide calculates grade averages by keeping a master total.
When you select Enter grades, the program will ask for the Master grade.
In many cases, this will be 100, but it does not need to be so. Many
teachers weight tests by simply assigning them different point totals.
Thus a quiz may be worth 10 points, a lab assignment worth 50 points, a
test worth 100 points and a final worth 200 points. Teacher's Aide
allows you to select whatever Master score you wish.
Teacher's Aide calculates a student's average by adding all the
Master grades, next adding the student's grades and dividing to find the
percentage. One note: All rounding is downwards. Thus, 86.78 becomes 86.
After you enter the Master grade, Teacher's Aide will prompt you in
turn for each student's score. Again, the student sequence will be the
same as the First time set up sequence.
If you accidentally enter zero or hit return before entering a
grade, Teacher's Aide will tell you the grade is zero and ask if that's
what you intended. Type Y if you meant it, any other key if not.
Since Teacher's Aide uses a master total, it is unforgiving of
missed tests. You have one of two choices: Either enter an average grade
for the student or enter zero for missing the test. You can change this
score, or any other score later. (See Correcting Errors section).
Summarize grades/
Print grades
These work identically except Summarize grades displays the results
on the screen while Print grades sends the results to the printer. The
program will give you a couple of seconds to turn the printer on and
then remind you if you have not done so.
In both cases, the program will list the student's grades across
along with a notation such as:
100 100 72 72
Sue Student average is: 86
Change Class
The change class option allows you to switch data disks without
having to restart the program. This is convenient if you want to enter
grades for a number of different classes in one session.
Exit
This returns you to the DOS prompt.
Correcting errors
Grades are stored on the data disk as a regular text file. Thus, it
is easy to change or alter the results of any individual file, even if
you know nothing about DOS commands.
With the data disk in drive A, from the prompt type dir for a
directory of the disk. The student files are S1 through S40 (or S(x)
where x is the number of students you have.)
To see a particular file enter TYPE Sx from the prompt and press
enter. Thus:
A>type S4
This would return the contents of the file S4 which might look like
this:
"Betty Jones"
100
78
89
94
10
10
100
Let's assume we wish to change the "94" grade to a "97". After you
have typed the file, all that's necessary is to correct it and rewrite
it to the disk. Thus the commands would be:
A> copy con S4 (or whatever the actual file name is)
"Betty Jones"
100
78
89
97
10
10
100
<Control Z> ENTER
The command copy "copy con S4" tells the computer to copy from the
console (keyboard) the new file S4. Be sure to enter the quote marks
around the name and each grade should be followed by an ENTER to put it
on a separate line. When you are done entering grades, push the control
key and the Z key at the same time and then press enter. (A Control-Z
may also be generated by pushing the F6 key.) This will cause the new
file to be written to the disk. Your DOS manual should have further
examples of this technique should you have questions.
Shareware
Teacher's Aide is a shareware program. That means if you find it of
use, you should become a registered user. To register, send $20 to Eric
Anderson, P.O. Box 871, Newark, Ohio 43055. Registered users who send
$30 will automatically receive the next update of the program.
Shareware is an exciting concept in software distribution. It allows
users the opportunity to try a program before buying it while helping
keep the distribution and marketing costs low. Please support the
shareware concept and help keep software prices down. Become a
registered user.
You are encouraged to share this program with others, provided a
copy of this documentation file accompanies the disk.
History
Teacher's Aide was originally developed for Atari 8-bit computers,
but was completely rewritten for MS-DOS machines using Turbo Basic, a
product of Borland Corp.
Suggestions for future features, modifications, etc. are welcomed.
Documentation and program are Copyright 1987 by Blaine Technologies