Course and Assignment Management

The button next to courses or assignments is visible to all users with the right permissions to manage courses or assignments. Clicking this button shows the corresponding management page.

Additionally, clicking on the name of a course results in an overview of its assignments and still allows to click the button on the bottom right to show the management page.

Course Management

Tip

CodeGrade has a Help Center, with better guides, more videos and updated documentation. The documentation and guides on this website are deprecated and will not be updated in the future. Please click here to go to this page on the Help Center!

On the first tab of the course management page, General, you can change the name of the course. The name may not be empty. As the name of LTI courses is copied from the LMS, the name of LTI courses cannot be changed within CodeGrade.

On this tab you can also archive a course. Archiving a course will hide it for students (or more precisely all users that do not have the “See archived courses” permission), and will sort it below all non archived courses. You can still import data from archived courses. Archiving can be reversed without data loss.

The second tab of the course management page, Members, displays a list of all users (students, teachers and other roles) that are enrolled in the course. The role of users can be changed here and new users can be added to the course.

Note

Course management is done in your learning management system if the course is connected, however managing roles and permissions is still done in CodeGrade.

The third tab, Permissions, shows an overview of all roles and their specific permissions. Existing roles can be altered and completely new roles can be added via the dialog on the bottom of the page. More information about the specific course permissions can be found in the permissions chapter.

The fourth tab, Groups, shows all group sets of the course. Here you create, delete and can edit the minimum and maximum size of group sets. Group sets are a key concept for group assignments in CodeGrade, more information about them can be found in the groups chapter.

The fifth tab, Snippets, shows all course-wide snippets in this course. These course snippets can be set up by the teacher and can be used by all graders grading in the course. These snippets are always in addition to the graders’ personal snippets and are indicated with the icon.

Creating a new Course

Specific site permissions are required to create a course, usually this can be done only be site administrators. If these permissions are set, a course can be created by navigating to the courses menu and clicking the icon. The name for the new course can then be given.

Assignment Management

Tip

CodeGrade has a Help Center, with better guides, more videos and updated documentation. The documentation and guides on this website are deprecated and will not be updated in the future. Please click here to go to this page on the Help Center!

Clicking the button next to a specific assignment shows the assignment management page. Usually all teachers and course designers can manage courses and assignments.

Assignment State

Three assignment states are available and can be set on the top right:

  • Hidden state: the assignment is invisible to students.

  • Open state: the assignment is visible to students and students can hand in submissions before the deadline.

  • Done state: the assignment is visible to students and grading is finished.

General

In this tab you can edit basic settings, such as the assignment name and deadline, but also some more advanced settings.

Assignment type

A CodeGrade assignment can be one of three types:

  • Normal: a regular assignment.

  • Exam: an exam. For exams you do not configure the deadline of an assignment but rather when it starts and a duration. Students can optionally receive an email with a link with which they can set a password and log into CodeGrade when the exam starts. During the exam students only have access to the course of the exam, and not any other courses.

    See the Exam mode documentation documentation for more information about exams in CodeGrade.

  • LTI: an assignment managed via a Learning Management System. You cannot switch to one of the other types of assignment.

Available at

The available at date of an assignment automates the transition from the hidden state of the assignment to the open state. Set a date and time and at that moment the assignment will become visible to students, so you don’t have to think about it anymore.

Upload types

CodeGrade offers two means of handing in for students: via the file uploader in CodeGrade or using Git (GitHub or GitLab).

  • File Uploader: this option allows students to hand in their submission through CodeGrade’s file uploader. Students can hand in one or multiple files and can even hand in archives (e.g. .zip or .tar.gz) which will be extracted automatically.

  • Git: this option allows students to configure their GitHub or GitLab repository to upload to CodeGrade with every push. Configuration instructions can be found on the hand-in page, the unique deploy key and webhook have to be configured for each separate assignment once per student.

Note

It is possible to use both the File Uploader and Git upload type together for the same assignment. Students can then choose which means of handing in they prefer.

Git uploading

CodeGrade allows students to hand in directly via GitHub or GitLab if the Git upload type is turned on for an assignment. Students can find instructions to configure their repository on the hand in page.

Setting up your repository to work together with CodeGrade is done with a deploy key and webhook. The deploy key is used to grant CodeGrade access to read your repository. The webhook is used to notify CodeGrade for each push event that takes place. With this setup, students will automatically upload their work to CodeGrade every time they push.

Warning

CodeGrade has a size limit on student submissions. Exceeding this size limit will result in a warning message when regularly handing in, but not when using git to upload. If a student exceeds this limit, files exceeding the limit are silently deleted. This very rare case does result in a cg-size-limit-exceeded file to show up in the Code Viewer.

Uploading via Git works together with CodeGrade’s tools, use it in combination with Continuous Feedback and AutoTest to provide immediate and automatic feedback to students every time they submit. It is also possible to combine Git uploading with group assignments. All students in a group will share the deploy key and webhook, anyone in the group can hand in for the whole group with a git push. Just like with regular handing in, all group members will have to open the CodeGrade assignment in their LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace or Moodle).

Warning

Hand-In Requirements are disabled when using the Git upload type.

In addition to further streamlining the workflow for students, Git uploading allows teachers to also assess git usage within CodeGrade. This can be done manually, by looking at the .git folder in the Code Viewer or directly opening the student repository by clicking the GitLab or GitHub link in the submission. In AutoTest, the student submission is a normal Git directory and can be handled and assessed that way automatically.

Note

Using git in AutoTest? Run git fetch --unshallow to make sure the information in the .git folder is complete and shows all history.

More information on setting up Git uploading can be found in the step-by-step guide.

Limiting the amount of submissions

By setting the maximum amount of submissions, and the cool off period you can limit the number of times students can hand-in.

Maximum submissions

By setting the maximum amount of submissions you can limit how many submissions a student can make in total for an assignment. If you set this to value to anything higher than 0 this is the total amount of submissions the student can make. They will be informed of this limit when they create a new submission. You can disable this limit by setting the limit to “0” or “infinite”.

Cool off period

The cool off period allows for a more advanced way of limiting the amount of submissions a student can create. Instead of setting a limit for the entire assignment, you can set a limit for a certain time frame in an assignment. This allows you to effectively set an amount of submissions a student may create in a certain time period.

Example

When the cool off period is set to “2 submissions every 10 minutes”, and a student submits at 10:00, and at 10:05 it will be impossible for this student to submit again before 10:10. If the student submits again at 10:11, it will now be impossible to submit again before 10:15.

You can combine the cool off period with a maximum amount of submissions. This could allow you, for example, to enforce a small wait period between two submissions, but also enforce a total amount of submissions.

Uploading Submissions

Submissions can be uploaded via the assignment management page too. Using the Upload submission tool submissions can be uploaded as any requested user: hand in submissions for students or hand in as administrator by selecting a user via the search bar. Submissions can be uploaded as an archive, which is automatically extracted by CodeGrade, or as multiple individual files.

You can also do a submission as a test student to check if your assignment setup works as expected. It can be useful to test your hand-in requirements, AutoTest configuration, you name it. You can even do test submissions before you have set a deadline on the assignment.

Peer feedback

Who knows better what problems students run into than the students themselves? This is why CodeGrade offers peer feedback, a way for students to review and learn from each other’s code. When peer feedback is enabled for an assignment students get assigned to a number of other students and get access to their submissions.

You can enable peer feedback by clicking the button, configuring the peer feedback settings, and finally pressing the “Submit” button.

Amount of students

This is the amount of submissions each student should review. Students are distributed randomly amongst each other. This happens in an auomated fashion once the deadline of the assignment has passed.

Warning

This setting should be treated with care, especially after the assignment’s deadline, because changing it will cause all students to be reassigned. The process of reassigning does not guarantee that students are assigned to the same peers as before the change, even when the number has increased. On the contrary, it is quite likely that almost all students are assigned to someone else than they had been.

Time to give peer feedback

The amount of time students have to give feedback to their peers. During this time students can place comments on the submissions they were assigned to. Students will still be able to view the submissions even after this time has passed.

Automatically approve comments

By default when a student places peer feedback on another student’s submission the other student will not be able to see it immediately. The comment first has to be approved by the teacher or teaching assistant. Enabling this option changes that behavior so that each comment is automatically approved.

Note

Comments can still be disapproved even with this setting turned on.

Group assignment

Here you can select which group set to use for this assignment. When a group set is selected the assignment becomes a group assignment. Group sets are a key concept for group assignments in CodeGrade, more information about them can be found in the groups chapter.

Hand-in Requirements

The hand-in requirements make it possible to set up strict rules to the structure requested for submissions to a specific assignment. Hand-in requirements consist of three different parts that specify the behaviour of your requirements.

First, a default policy should be selected: by default deny all files or by default allow all files. Exceptions to these rules can be given in the third part of the specifications.

Secondly, numerous options can be selected to further specify the behaviour of your requirements. These options are:

  • Delete empty directories: If enabled, automatically delete empty directories in submissions.

  • Delete leading directories: If enabled, automatically delete superfluous leading directories (i.e. top-level directories in which all files / subdirectories are located).

  • Allow overrides by students: If enabled, the student can, after being shown a warning, still force hand in the submission even if it violates the hand-in requirements.

Thirdly, rules can be given that consist of exceptions to the default rule and requiring certain files. These rules can apply to files anywhere in the submission or files that have to be in an given path relative to the top level directory. These rules are individual and do not have any ordering between them.

Note

Use / or \ as a directory separator to specify that certain files are required, allowed or denied in a directory. Start the rule with a directory separator (/ or \) to specify that a file is required, allowed or denied in the top level directory.

To match more than one file, you can use a single wildcard for the name of the file, by using a *. For example /src/*.py matches any file ending with .py in the directory src that is directly in the top level directory of the submission.

More information on setting up hand-in requirements can be found in the step-by-step guide.

Group assignment

Here you can select which group set to use for this assignment. When a group set is selected the assignment becomes a group assignment. Group sets are a key concept for group assignments in CodeGrade, more information about them can be found in the groups chapter.

Graders

In this tab you can edit all settings regarding graders, like dividing and setting up notifications for them.

Dividing Submissions

To randomly and automatically assign graders to all submissions the Divide Submission feature on the assignment management page can be used. A list of all graders is displayed and after selecting the wanted graders weights can be given to affect the workload per grader. The resulting percentage is the percentage of submissions the grader will be randomly assigned to. Newly submitted submissions are automatically assigned to graders after dividing is performed. Dividing submissions is consistent, so new submissions will get assigned to the same teaching assistant.

Manually assigning submissions is possible via the submission list, by selecting the grader using the ‘Assigned to’ dropdown dialog.

It is also possible to link the divisions and assignees of multiple assignments. To do this you can select a parent assignment in the selector below the weights of the graders. When an assignment is connected to another assignment, the child assignment copies the settings and assignees of the parent assignment. After linking, the division settings of the parent and the child are frozen. Multiple assignments can be linked to the same parent, however a parent cannot be linked to another assignment as a child.

When a student submits to a child or parent assignment CodeGrade tries to assign the student to the same assignee as in other assignments. It does this by first copying the assignee of the parent assignment for the submitting student, or if this is not possible selecting the most common assignee in the children assignments.

Note

When teachers manually assign themselves, weights are not updated to reflect this.

Finished Grading and Notifications

CodeGrade provides essential communication tools between graders in the shape of email notifications. These notifications rely on graders indicating that they are done grading by setting their state to ‘Done’ after all grading is finished.

Warning

It is possible to set a grader to the ‘Done’ state that did not finish grading all assigned submissions, a warning is shown in this case.

E-mail Notifications

CodeGrade provides two types of email notifications to enable essential communication between graders:

  • Graders notification: send an email at a specified date and time to all graders that have not yet finished grading.

  • Finished notification: send an email to a specified email address to notify when all graders are finished grading.

Note

For these notifications to be sent, graders must manually update their status.

Plagiarism

CodeGrade offers built in plagiarism detection functionalities, to efficiently and clearly detect for plagiarism on programming assignments. In this tab you can configure plagiarism runs. Please consult the Plagiarism Detection chapter for more information.

Rubric

Rubrics are an indispensable tool in modern day education and allow for easy and consistent grading between different graders and submissions. In this tab you can setup and edit the rubric of the assignment. Sophisticated rubrics can be made in CodeGrade. A basic rubric consist of multiple categories that all have multiple levels and corresponding points. All components in a CodeGrade rubric can have a name and description.

A new rubric can be created by clicking the button. You can also import a rubric by clicking the button.

After creating a new rubric or copying an existing rubric you can add categories by pressing at the end of the list of categories. There are two types of categories:

Discrete rubric categories

Discrete rubric categories are rubric categories with multiple levels, each assigned a number of points, in them. When grading one level in a category can be selected. New levels can be created by clicking on the empty level with the large in it. You can remove levels by pressing the button.

Continuous rubric categories

Besides the more traditional discrete categories, CodeGrade also offers continuous categories. Continuous categories are assigned a maximum amount of points (which should be higher than 0), and when grading any amount of points between 0 and the set maximum can be assigned for the category. This allows you, for example, to split your grade into multiple categories, while still allowing precise grading. Continuous rubric categories are also very useful for AutoTest.

Tip

A rubric is only saved after pressing the ‘Submit’ button, it is recommended to occasionally save the rubric to prevent losing work.

AutoTest

The AutoTest configuration and results can be viewed and edited in the AutoTest tab. For more information on how to set up AutoTest refer to the AutoTest documentation.

Creating a new Assignment

With the right permissions new assignments for a course can be created. To do this, select the course in the Course menu and click on it to display its assignment list. A new assignment can now be created for this course using the button on the bottom of the menu-screen. Press Add after specifying a name for the assignment to create it.