Gofer Grader

Gofer Grader is a small library for autograding Jupyter notebooks & python files.

What is autograding?

Autograding runs a series of tests against student submitted code, producing a grade. No humans are in the loop in determining the correctness / grade of student submission.

It is unit testing with weighted grades and feedback for students when tests fail.

Why autograding?

Grading takes up a large chunk of teaching time for many instructors. While not everything can be automatically graded, many excercises can be. This saves the instructor a lot of time & tedious effort, regardless of the size of the class.

Autograding provides near-instant feedback to students on how well they are doing. This allows them to correct course immediately, without having to wait for an instructor to grade & provide feedback.

Scope of this project

This project is tightly scoped to provide only the following:

1. Write grading tests in multiple formats
2. Run grading tests (interactively or in batch) against a Jupyter Notebook or Python file.
3. Provide multiple strategies for determining overall grade from pass / fail results of single tests.

Everything else is out of scope, and should be implemented elsewhere. Examples of features that are out of scope are:

1. Distributing notebooks / lab materials to users
2. Collecting notebooks / lab materials from users
3. Running grading at scale
4. Highly secure execution (only relying on stdout / stderr for validation)
5. Tools to help build student notebooks (without solutions & hidden tests) from instructor notebooks
6. Ponies

This list is not exhaustive :)