Requirements Specification Prototype Design Implementation Testing Administration Documentation

1.5 Related Systems

There are many bad examples of software designed to help organize grades. Probably born out of a lack of a clear industry leader, this software has few communal standards or interfaces. Some programs that are otherwise unremarkable have impressive single features. Some of the most robust offerings are:

• Thinkwave Educator
  
• Gradelog Lite
  
• Easy Grade Pro
  
• Gradekeeper
  
• Gradebook Power
  

All of these systems can keep track of grades, but they often do so in inefficient or awkward ways. The Grader Tool will improve on the heavily structured and arbitrary organization schemes present in these grading programs. Many of the features present in these grading tools will also not be present in the Grader Tool as nearly every tool detailed has features beyond those needed to merely track grades. The Grader tool will eliminate unnecessary features and will have these improvements over currently available programs:

1. Features designed to make adapting class grading schemes easy and efficient including graphic representations of the current grade layout (and the means to change that graphical) and the ability to predict student performance and see the results.
2. A Weighting and organization system that is highly flexible, allowing the grade book to be divided up however the user wishes and weights to range from static to dependent on other students scores.
3. Versions of the grading program for both students and teachers so that all parties involved have access to the same information.
4. Tight integration with the Cal Poly account system.

A detailed review of each of the tools we examined can be found here:

• Thinkwave Educator review

• Gradelog Lite review
• Easy Grade Pro review
• Gradekeeper review

• Gradebook Power review

For an abridged overview of these tools please see this

Feature Comparison Matrix.