A starting point for learning about Gradescope autograding, intended for UCSB CS department faculty and TAs migrating from UCSB's submit.cs
Gradescope's main product offering is a web-based tool for grading pencil/paper exams and homework, but that is not what this article is about.
Recently, Gradescope also introduced an autograder option that is in the same space as UCSB's home-grown submit.cs (website, source code) but offers a more robust and flexible infrastructure for building auto-graded assignments.
At a high level, making an autograded assignment on Gradescope is quite simple: you create a .zip file with a certain format, and you upload it to the Gradescope website.
From there, students can access the Gradescope website to submit their code. There are also options for submitting directly from a private git repository.
| Repo | Description |
|---|---|
| https://github.com/project-anacapa/gradescope-simple-template-draft | Script to help you setup autograder.zip that connects to github |
| https://github.com/project-anacapa/gradescope-cpp-unit-test | A template for a C++ autograded assignment |
Some CS16/24/32 assignments are based on a homegrown TDD library for C++ that consists of two files: tddFuncs.h and tddFuncs.cpp.
The repo gradescope-cpp-unit-test contains versions of those files that can typically be dropped in as replacements for the originals.
Doing so adds Gradescope support for those assignments, because the new versions generate a results.json file (or add into an existing one) as a side-effect of running the unit tests.
In general, the process to convert an existing assignment consists of:
- Replace
tddFuncs.handtddFuncs.cppwith the ones from gradescope-cpp-unit-test. - Add
-I/usr/include/jsoncpp -std=c++11to theCXXFLAGS - Add
-ljsoncppto each link step either directly, or viaLDFLAGS - Try
make cleanandmaketo ensure it compiles - Try running the tests to see if you get a
results.jsonfile.