The Marks Aggragation Sub-system
This sub-system provides a means to aggregate student marks and to output the results of this. Clicking on the "form aggregate marks" link on the leads to a series of forms being displayed by which the manager can determine the aggregation to be performed. The process allows for different aggregations to be done through a choice of the questions for which marks are to be aggregate and what marks records are to be operated on. The sequence of pages and their description follows:-
- Select Question Source Form
There are 2 basic choices (Figure 20) for the source of the questions for which the marks are to be aggregated. The primary and usual choice is the question list table in the database; the other choice is the primary record store of the question list table sub-system or the record store of one of its cut buffers. For the latter choice a number has to be added to identify which record store is to be accessed: "0" identifies the primary record store, while "1", "2", "3", etc identify the successive cut buffer: the one selected must exist, of course, and for the primary record store this means that the question list table must have been read in by opening the question list table sub-system. The available buffers are identified on the form as a set of radio buttons.
Having chosen the question source, clicking the "Submit" button parses the question source and identifies the topic names and displays these in the .
- Select Topics to aggregate form
This form, Figure 21, displays a set of checkboxes identified by the topic names from the question list source; the default is that all check boxes are ticked. The selections can be changed to select the the topics the marks of which are to be aggregated.
Once the selection has been made, clicking on the submit button displays the .
- Marks Source Selection Form
This allows the source of the marks records to be searched during the aggregation: the marks table in the database or one of the record stores of the Marks Table Sub-system, provided these are available, which requires this sub-system have been opened earlier in the management session. Providing access to the marks table record stores allows for the marks to be processed in some way to select a sub-set of marks to be seached, e.g. sorting the records by data and copying a sub-set of records prior to a particular data into a cut buffer.
The available sources are shown in the form as a set of radio buttons one of which can be selected as the mark source. Clicking on the "Submit" button causes the aggration to be performed, searching the selected marks records for the questions whose marks are to be aggregated and totaling the marks by user. This process collects a range of data for each user, which is displayed in the Figure 22.
The result of the aggregation process is a range of data for user, and this data is stored as a record in a record store. The record in the store are displayed in the exactly same way as for the records of any of the database tables, Figure 22. This allows the results to be manipulated with the set of function, see the common functions detailed for the the Section called Username-password Table Sub-system, developed for processing table records, and simplified the coding.
 | It should be noted that the aggregation results are not stored in the database, although a "Save-To_database" function is shown. |
There are several fields to each result record:-
| the user name |
| the number of topics attempted as a fraction of the total number of topics selected for aggregation, e.g. 15/16 |
| the number of questions attempted as a fraction of the total number of question in the topics selected for aggregation, e.g. 67/83 |
| the total marks achieved by the user for the topics and marks aggregated |
| the maxumim mark available for the questions and topics aggregated |
| the marksSet field holds a reference to an object that is not displayable on the screen, but which holds more information on the questions answered. This data is written to file when the "Save-to-File" function is performed on the marks records. [This field is shown because of the way that the records display software works: it should be possible to hide this display in future releases.] |
Extensions to this page might allow provide for e-mail results and/or warning messages to students for feedback or chasing purposes.