Should tutors not be allowed to judge when assignment is still active

[moschlar]

I want to put this up for discussion:

Should tutors not be allowed to start creating judgements while the assignment is still active?

This was reported by one tutor user, but I had not been considering it a bug but a feature, since I generally intend tutor and teacher users to be trustworthy entities which know what they are doing (since they might cause lots of harm by e.g. deleting things :D). That situation won't probably happen very often, since tutors normally don't even take a look at the submissions before the submission date is reached. Additionally, it would only be a restriction for tutors, not for the teacher.

This will probably be a more serious issue, if Issue #95 is resolved.

Anyway, I'd like to have your thoughts on that, @Seelge and @limbach!

[Seelge]

Judgements happen after the submission date because students can and should be able to change their submission prior to the submission date. A judgement should not be possible but I can't think of a reason why a tutor would judge prior to the submission date, therefore I think this is a theoretical issue that will not have any real consequences.

[limbach]

What if I find plagiarism and want to directly grade an assignment as 0.0? Wouldn't it be useful to allow this?

Another question is whether or not Sauce should allow for commenting on the creation process of a program. It sure would be nice if a tutor could give hints by commenting on a code line or by leaving a general comment. On the other hand, such conversation may also be done directly via e-mail.

[Seelge]

A student who wants to submit copied source code and then modify it so that it no longer get's detected as a copy is not a smart student. He should do that in Eclipse prior to submitting.

Commenting on the creation process would require proof-reading the code multiple times, during creation and after it is submitted. If a student has questions he can submit the code and then ask me personally. Having the student in the office while trying to decypher the code is much more time efficient.

[moschlar]

@limbach

• What exactly do you mean? Just a "Kick ass"-Button that will immediately enter a grading of 0.0 with a comment like "You plagiate, you fail!"?
• You mean explicitly browsing the history of a submission and making comments on lines of previous versions (just like here on Github when you comment on a specific commit)?

@Seelge

• Let's hope that no student reads that advice here :D

In general, I think the convention that even if a submission consists of multiple files which may have multiple historic revisions, a judgement is only given once for the final state of the submission would be sufficient and best from a usability viewpoint.

[limbach]

I just wanted to provide an example for a situation where a grading prior to reaching the deadline could be useful.

Another scenario is that I sometimes like to start grading submissions because I have time for it at that moment even if the deadline is not yet reached. Of course I only start grading of submissions where I assume no further changes (i.e. submissions that are 100% correct). Maybe such a grading should not be visible for the students and be discarded if the students change the source after my grading, but for my personal workflow it would be a bit inconvenient if I was not allowed to enter any comments/grades.

Being able to comment on the creation history would be a nice feature, but probably a bit of an overkill. As Martin mentioned, there are other ways of communicating with students that may be better suited for this purpose.

[moschlar]

Since teachers and tutors are considered reponsible entities, they will be allowed to create judgements even if the assignment is still active, they will just be warned. This won't disrupt @limbach s workflow and for the common case, where tutors start judging after the assignment is finished, this is irrelevant.