Analyze Grades

This program will produce statistics, by major, for selected assignments in selected courses.

Preparation

Dependencies

You need Python. I think Python 3.6 and newer will work fine.

You need the canvasapi module. Run

pip install canvasapi

Note: I'm pretty sure this is not the same module that Chris Bourke demonstrated a couple of years ago.

Getting a Canvas API Key

To interface with Canvas, you need a Canvas API Key. Log into Canvas and click on the Account icon in the left gutter. In the resulting menu, click on Settings.

On your account settings page, scroll down until you see the + New Access Token button. Click on that button. Fill out the fields in the popup window and click on Generate Token. You will then get a new popup window with the token's details. DO NOT close this window yet.

Copy the config-example.py file to config.py and open config.py for editing. Delete the text Your Canvas API Key goes here (leave the opening- and closing-quotes). Copy the token from your browser's popup window and paste it between the opening- and closing-quotes in config.py.

Getting Students' Majors

You no longer need to manually retrieve students' majors from MyRed. The program now retrieves students' majors from directory.unl.edu.

Edit rosters.csv

You no longer need to maintain a rosters file. The program now retrieves your courses from Canvas for a specified semester.

Run the program

Start the program with

python analyze_grades.py

You will be prompted to confirm the program's best-guess of the semester you want to analyze. Confirm the semester or select a different semester. You will then be presented with a list of the courses that you are associated with for that semester. (Note that this is now based on Canvas courses, so if you merged courses then it will only present the courses as sthey appear in Canvas.) Select one.

Please wait patiently at ths step. To determine each student's major, the program must access Canvas to determine their login name and then must access the UNL directory to determine their major(s). Canvas queries in particular can take longer than you might like. There is a progress bar to reassure you that the program is, well, progressing.

After the students' majors have been retrieved, you'll be given the option of printing statistics for the entire course or to print statistics for each individual section. In most cases you'll want statistics for the entire course. The only example I can think of in which printing statistics for each section would be desirable is the capstone program, in which we don't want to commingle the statistics from students in their first year of capstone with those from students in their second year of capstone.

You'll then be presented with an assignment group, and after you select one, you'll be presented with a list of assignments in that group. Select one.

After you select the assignment, you'll be provided the statistics for it. (Again, please be patient, as the Canvas queries can take a few seconds.)

You will then be given then option to select another assignment from the same course. If you choose not to do so, then you will be given the option to select a different course.

Right now this program will only analyze a full assignment. If you're using a particular question off of an exam or quiz, you're going to have to do that analysis manually for now. I know how to get data from individual Canvas quiz questions -- so if we want to use this program going forward then I can make that happen, but for my immediate purposes it wasn't necessary so I didn't add that code.

Notes

• The program will provide statistics for all computing majors, explicitly stating when there are no students in a particular computing major in the course. The program will also provide statistics for non-computing majors represented in the course: even though this is not required for OAT, you may find it interesting. (Due to students taking multiple majors, the numbers of students may exceed the number of students in the course.) The program does not report statistics for computing minors.
• For majors with particularly long names (e.g., "Criminology and Criminal Justice"), the formatting may be a little off.
• The program only works at the assignment level. If you are making an OAT assessment with a specific quiz/exam question (and the quiz/exam is a Canvas quiz), let me know and I'll add question-level functionality.

If you print statistics for each individual section, you may see advisories indicating that one or more students could not be located. If you pay close attention, these are students who dropped the course.

For the curious, the code

• analyze_grades.py contains the main function and is pretty simple code, a hair over 100 lines. I hope it's readable enough that I don't need to describe it.
• config.py you've already met.
• majors.py defines a data structure to hold information about majors and then defines our three computing majors as well business majors (so that the program lumps Raikes students in business majors with non-Raikes students in business majors).
• common_functions.py has a few utility functions that I made for another project. I only use one of them here.
• api/canvas_classes.py is also from another project; it has a slew of classes that use the canvasapi package.