1.4. Impact Analysis

The PolyGrade grading software potential positive impacts include decreased difficulty of entering and editing grades for professors, increased student and professor understanding of class progress and increased efficiency and reliability of the necessary authentication and file server update steps. Along with increased reliability and efficiency of authentication and file server updating, a related positive impact focuses on faster end-of-quarter grade submission compared to current web-based system utilized by Cal Poly faculty. Finally, PolyGrade software increases student options for electronic assignment turn-in, compared to the current stand-alone electronic turn-in utilized by some Cal Poly Computer Science faculty.

PolyGrade shares its main negative impact with many standalone applications. PolyGrade software must be implemented efficiently and securely so as to prevent software malfunctions, which ruin PolyGrade's purpose. This negative impact develops into subcategories including privacy, security and reliability. PolyGrade must be well-implemented to prevent unauthorized users from accessing students' grades and intercepting grades as they transfer among local and server machines. Likewise, software malfunctions may drastically interrupt a professor's grade updates, desynchronizing student grade view and professor grade view. Furthermore, if the electronic assignment turn-in feature is not implemented securely, students may be able to alter electronic turn-in dates, allowing them to turn in late work unpenalized. Lastly, PolyGrade must maintain its functionality if a professor chooses it over the current web-based grading system, otherwise a professor will have nothing to fall back on should PolyGrade stop working properly; it follows that students will also experience difficulties viewing grades if PolyGrade's reliability internally collapses.