Uploading Grades to Mallard

Mallard lets you input non-Mallard grades and display them in a secure manner: students see only their own grades and whatever statistical information you wish to make available. There are two ways to do this: upload grades that are maintained elsewhere (e.g. using a spreadsheet such as EXCEL) or using the new Mallard Online Gradebook.

Mallard Online Gradebook

The Mallard Online Gradebook is new for Mallard 3.0. It allows an instructor to display and handle non-Mallard grades. Mallard and non-Mallard grades can be merged - even within the same assignment.

Features include the following:

view all grades for a single student
view all students' grades for a particular assignment
configure student groups so that a single group grade will automatically be entered for all students in that group
statistics, including histogram, available for each assignment
ability to enter grades for an entire assignment or for each part of an assignment
conversion of numeric to letter grades at the end of a course

The Mallard gradebook does not quite have all the features we would like and may be somewhat confusing to navigate. Complete documentation for using it is being written and will be available shortly. We hope that as many people as possible will begin to use our online gradebook - and provide feedback. We will work hard to incorporate your ideas.

If you would like a copy of the documentation or have questions/problems, please contact djb@uiuc.edu.

Uploading Grades to Mallard

The ability to upload grades has been available in previous versions of Mallard and has not been changed. We expect, however, that users will be migrating toward the Mallard Online Gradebook.

How to Upload Grades
To get to the upload grades page, you must have 'instructor' access. Click on 'View Grades' in the student area of the homepage and then on 'Grades uploaded by course staff'. A form to upload grades will be at the top of the page.

Mallard expects the uploaded grades to be in a comma-separated format (CSV). This is a standard spreadsheet format, and you should easily be able to save the file in this format by using your spreadsheets "Save As..." (or equivalent) feature. In addition to the CSV format, the grades must obey the following rules:

The first row must contain heading information (it will be shown to all students).
The first column of the spreadsheet must be the student's Mallard login.
Any row with a * as the first character in the first column will be shown to all students. (This is useful for showing statistics.)

Viewing Grades
When instructors view the grades, they see the grades for all students. Rows that every student can see are printed in red.

Students see all the rows in red as well as the one row associated with their own login.

For example, if you uploaded the following grades file:

Login,HW1, HW2, HW3
bob,50,100,60
mary,100,80,50
*Average,75,90,55

An instructor would see this:

     Login     HW1   HW2   HW3 
       bob      50   100    60 
      dave     100   100   100 
   Average      75    90    55

and the student bob would see this:

Login	HW1	HW2	HW3
bob	50	100	60
Average	75	90	55

Downloading Mallard Grades

To download Mallard grades, click on 'Gradebook' on the homepage. Then click on 'Download Mallard Grades'.

There would probably be no reason to use this facility if you are using the Mallard Online Gradebook. It is available only as a convenience to those who have used it before and might wish to continue using it. We expect all courses to begin to migrate toward the Mallard Online Gradebook.

Comments? Questions? General harassment? Mail it to maiko@wocket.csl.uiuc.edu