The general problems to be addressed by the Grader Tool project are the following:

1. to provide a feature rich, easy to use tool for educators to record grades
2. to present class grade statistics in a series of visually appealing graphs
3. to allow students to see grades updated in real time

While these problems have been solved by a number of commercially available and public domain products, the Grader Tool provides a solution with certain functional improvements over existing tools. Specific problem areas are the following:

1. customize late and extra credit policies for individual assignments
2. automatically grading electronically submitted assignments
view grades information for the history of class offerings

The Grader Tool project addresses the requirements of a particular customer. This customer needs a tool with a collection of features not available in any single existing tool. This aspect of the problem is one of combining a set of existing features in a way that the features have yet to be combined in another product.

In addition, the development of functioning software, the Grader Tool project focuses on some additional problems not addressed in commercial tools:

1. to allow adjustment of graphs to modify grade ranges

2. to allow students to see other student's grades to see how the student compares with other students.
   Note: Other students' identities will be withheld in this view