CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2019 - E1985. Let course staff and students do reviews

Problem Statement

Peer review is a great way for students to learn about how well they have developed their application. However, sometimes, the peer reviews may not be thorough and the team/person's work reviewed might not reflect the actual status of the development. By letting course staff perform reviews as well, the reviewer and the reviewee both benefit, improving the overall learning experience. Currently, there exists no method for the instructor/TA to perform reviews of assignments submitted by the students. Hence this is what this project aims at, allowing instructor/TA to perform reviews.

Thus, the primary aim of this project is to allow instructors to submit reviews of student work, using the same review form that students use to do reviews.

Implementation Details

Our project aims at enabling the instructor/TA to review the submissions using the same form that a student uses while peer-reviewing. For this, our implementation has been divided into 3 parts, and can be described as follows:

 1. The first part involves the primary functionality of letting the staff perform a review on students submission.
 2. The second part involves allowing the students to identify from their end, which review has been performed by an instructor/TA. This will help the students improve their project as the opinions presented by a staff member would be valid.  
 3. Thirdly, we implemented an additional feature that allows the instructor/TA to add himself as a participant while creating/editing an Assignment (This way seemed to be more convenient rather than going to the “Add Participant” page and adding themselves as a participant.)

Issue 1: Allow TA / Instructor to perform review of student assignments

Current Scenario: Instructors and TA's can not perform reviews. Previous attempts were made but they either complicated the code or did not pass the Travis CI. For this particular task, the following screenshot describes how the current scenario looks. The page below is the “View Submissions” page when logged in as an instructor.

Requirement: This functionality is needed so that the instructors can easily perform submission reviews which can also be viewed by the students. Also for future purposes, other student reviews can be bench marked against an instructor review.

Proposed Implementation: The following things need to be improved/changed with respect to the above screenshot.
The second column consists of the title name with the link to “Assign Grade.” This is the part which we will have to modify. The link under the project title should be as follows:

1. “Perform Review,” until the deadline for the assignment hasn’t been reached. If he/she has already started the review, the link will be modified to “Edit Review,” until they don’t submit it.
2. “Assign Grade,” after the deadline of the assignment passes.
When clicked on “Perform Review”/”Edit Review,” it should direct to the review page seen by the students, and be able to perform the review. Thus it will direct the page to the response#new page or response#edit page respectively.

For the above-mentioned flow, the following file will be edited:
app/views/assignments/list_submissions.html.erb: This view file refers to the page in the above screenshot. This file will be edited to check whether the deadline for the current assignment has been passed, and accordingly it will display either of the two options denoted above.

For the above functionality to work smoothly, we need to keep 2 checks:

1. Whether the reviewer is a TA/instructor for the selected course
2. Whether the TA/instructor is a participant for that assignment

These issues can be independently described as follows:

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Issue 2: Show students that her/his assignment has been reviewed by the instructor

Currently Scenario: There is no way for the student to know which review was by the instructor.
Requirement: This helps the student to identify the review made by the instructor from the other reviews.
Proposed Implementation: An icon will be added in the file app/assets/stylesheets/grades.scss to make an instructor performed review look different from other reviews.

Activity Diagram of the Proposed Implementation

The following activity diagram summarizes our proposed implementation for the above mentioned issue:

Test Plan

The following presents the list of specs which we will write/modify to test the working of our modified code :

1. The instructor/TAs perform a review for the submission before the deadline of submission
2. The instructor/TA saves a review
3. The instructor/TAs review a previously saved review
4. The instructor/TAs edit a previously saved review
5. The instructor/TAs perform grading assignment after the deadline for reviewing has passed
6. There is an update review link available after the deadline for reviewing has passed
7. The instructor/TA has been assigned for the same course
8. The instructor/TA has added himself as the participant in the submission
9. An icon is displayed which identifies instructor/TA's review

Team Members

Mentor: Prof. Edward Gehringer (efg@ncsu.edu)

• Anuja Kulkarni - apkulka2@ncsu.edu
• Mark Trawick - mtrawic@ncsu.edu
• Parvathy Menon - pharida@ncsu.edu
• Samruddhi Khandale - sskhanda@ncsu.edu