EGAD! Eric's Grading Application Distribution

What is it?

EGAD is a set of programs designed to help automate the process of grading assignments for a course. EGAD does not actually assign grades; it's sort of a poor man's workflow management tool for grading.

Here's what EGAD lets you do:

Quickly file electronically received assignments
Automatically cycle through different students' submissions so that it's easy to consecutively grade all entries for each problem. I contend that this makes it easier to be consistent in your grading than if you do whole assignments at a time.
Do semi-blind grading: By viewing only the submitted problem, and not the submitters' identities, it's easier to be fair. EGAD abuses emacs to supress filenames which would identify the students.
Avoid having to copy grades: EGAD displays a grade-entry window along with the assignment to be graded. This makes is easy to enter a grade and comments once, while looking at the assignment.
Generate spreadsheets of grades.
Automatically mail grades and comments to students.
Support group assignments, and map group grades to group members.
Keep all assignments, and all of your grades and comments, under version control. This affords a margin of protection against losing your data.
Other stuff.

Here's the README.

Is it done yet?

No, but it's in "production" use.

Will it be useful to me?

Maybe.

I want it anyway!

Download EGAD 0.1.1 and try it out. If you don't mind mucking with Python and shell scripts, it may save you some work.

What's MIMEsign?

MIMEsign is a little script that's part of EGAD, but it's also available separately. It reads plain text on stdin and outputs a signed OpenPGP MIME message. It currently supports only password-less keys, because it's intended to be run from an automated script anyway. You can download it from the same page.

What kind of damned fool wrote this thing?

This glop was written by Eric Anderson, that's who. I've written some other stuff too.