E1863 Issues related to assignment creation
Introduction
An instructor or TA can create assignments within a course. There are a lot of configurations that can be made while creating these assignments and there are a few known issues related to this.
Problem statement
There are 5 issues that are being dealt with in this project:
If there are multiple topics added in an staggered-deadlined assignment and if the deadline of those topics are in future, students are not able to sign up for any of them. Overall assignment due dates are taking precedence, on the Due Dates tab. Due dates for the assignment needs to be changed manually to the due dates for the new topics just added. Students are able to sign up for topics only when all of the assignment due dates are in the future AND the due date for the topic they are choosing is in the future. They should be able to sign up if only the due date for the topic they are choosing is in the future. The overall assignment due dates should be irrelevant. In other words, topic should obey just the topic deadlines and not the assignment deadlines.
At present, when the TA creates a new assignment, only he has the ability to delete it. The task at hand is to allow the instructor to delete the assignment that is created by a TA.
There are assignments that have rubrics that vary by round, i.e. each round of the assignment review will have a different set of rubrics. When such an assignment is copied, there exists a problem where the rubrics from the original assignment are not copied over properly to the new assignment. This new assignment does not have rubrics that vary by round, as in the original assignment, but have the rubric from Round 1 in the original assignment copied over for all rounds. This makes the copying of assignments incomplete and thus, needs to be fixed.
The Issue is that the Instructor is not able to participate in a given assignment. This issues require a fix so that the instructor can also add himself as a participant in the assignment created .This fix will allow the instructor to perform the same functionality as the other student participants as reviewing peer assignments , submitting assignment, etc.
While creating/editing an assignment, one of the configurations is setting up of the rubrics. This is done in the 'Rubrics' tab of the assignment page. While setting up the rubrics, we can assign a weight to each of it, so that the final score will be the weighted sum of the different rubric scores. The default weight of a rubric is always 0%, meaning that it's not counted towards the final score. But if any of the rubric is assigned with a non-zero weight, we need to make sure that the sum of all the weights of the various rubrics add up to 100%. This is not enforced currently, allowing the user to have a total weight which is between 0% and 100%. This needs to be fixed to bring in a hard stop, if the sum of the weights don't add up to 0% or 100%.
Proposed Solution
For staggered deadline assignments, different topics might have different deadlines. So, the deadline for each topic needs to be checked on an individual basis. Deadlines for individual topics are stored in a table called due_dates with the parent_id as the identifier of the particular topic in place of the assignment identifier. A logic for getting the due dates of individual topics for staggered deadline assignments is found in the method check_topic_due_date_value in the module SignUpSheetHelper.
topic_due_date = TopicDueDate.where(parent_id: topic_id, deadline_type_id: deadline_type_id, round:review_round).first rescue nil if !topic_due_date.nil? due_date = topic_due_date.due_at else due_date = assignment_due_dates[review_round - 1].due_at.to_s
Currently, if the signup deadline of the the assignment is earlier that the submission deadline for a topic, that topic is not available for taking. This is restricted by the following piece of code in _all_actions.html.erb.
<% elsif (@signup_topic_deadline.nil? || (Time.now < @signup_topic_deadline.due_at)) &&
(!@assignment.staggered_deadline? || (Time.now < get_topic_deadline([@assignment.due_dates.find_by(deadline_type_id: 1)], topic.id))) %>
<td align="center"><%= link_to image_tag('Check-icon.png', :border => 0, :title => 'Signup', :align => 'middle'), :controller=>'sign_up_sheet', :action=> 'sign_up',
:id=>params[:id],:topic_id => topic.id, :assignment_id => params[:assignment_id] %></td>
<% end %>
Fix to be implemented(tentative): Change the above piece of code to allow signing up staggered assignment topics bases on the topic deadline and not on the assignment sign up deadline. The prospective change is shown below.
<% elsif ((@signup_topic_deadline.nil? || (Time.now < @signup_topic_deadline.due_at)) &&
(!@assignment.staggered_deadline? || (Time.now < get_topic_deadline([@assignment.due_dates.find_by(deadline_type_id: 1)], topic.id)))) ||
(@assignment.staggered_deadline? || (Time.now < get_topic_deadline([@assignment.due_dates.find_by(deadline_type_id: 1)], topic.id)))%>
<td align="center"><%= link_to image_tag('Check-icon.png', :border => 0, :title => 'Signup', :align => 'middle'), :controller=>'sign_up_sheet', :action=> 'sign_up',
:id=>params[:id],:topic_id => topic.id, :assignment_id => params[:assignment_id] %></td>
<% end %>
Log in as a Instructor. When the instructor is logged in he can create a new assignment or use an existing assignment . All the assignments that are created would require participants which happens to be the responsibility of the instructor . Thus the Instructor adds the participants to the assignment and with this fix the instructor will be added as a participant by default every time a new assignment is created.The new functionality in the assignment controller will be modified to resolve the issue.
When we save a new/existing assignment, we need to bring in a check to see if the sum of the weights of the various rubrics add up to 0 or 100%. If this check fails, we need to throw a notice that says, "Sum of weights of rubrics need to be 0 or 100%.". The user has to make the corresponding modification to the weights and try again. If the check succeeds, we continue with the assignment saving process.
