[LON-CAPA-admin] scantron format

[Stuart Raeburn]

Jim,

> Is there a way to enter a line in scantronformat.tab so that it can
> cope with variable length fields?

No, not currently.

LON-CAPA currently extracts data from bubblesheet ("scantron") records  
based on column position.  As you indicate, the current structure of  
the scantronformat.tab file is a colon separated list of column  
positions, column lengths, and in the case of Qon and Qoff - the  
character(s) (or types) used for bubbled versus unbubbled.

> Or is there an easier way to deal with this.

The LON-CAPA code used to grade scantron records will be modified to  
support an alternative CSV data format.  Until such time as this  
enhancement is available in a LON-CAPA release, as Domain Coordinator  
you might want to consider assigning LON-CAPA's "Scantron Operator"  
role to a staff person in the office responsible for processing  
scantron sheets at your university, and have that office run a custom  
script over a CSV file extracted from the Excel file output from  
ParScore for any LON-CAPA courses, before uploading the resulting  
scantron data file to LON-CAPA.  A custom script would need to written  
to convert the CSV data to a column position-based format.

The "Scantron Operator" role has rights to upload scantron data files  
to course(s) in the domain.  Under this scheme neither you nor faculty  
would need to be involved in the manipulation of scantron data to  
satisfy format requirements, as they exist in LON-CAPA today.

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group


> With our university moving to ParScore for scantron processing, I now
> have to deal with the new format.  They had said it would be in csv
> format, but I just got one back and it is excel.  I can open it in
> excel and save as csv, but I don't see how to add it to the equivalent
> of scantronformat.tab, since that assumes a fixed column location for
> the start of various fields.
>
> Below are a few example lines from a csv generated from a returned
> excel file.  The format is
> ID,LastName,FirstName,MiddleInitial,,responses
>
> 3404816,STUDENT,EVAN,,,A,A,B,A,D,C,D,A,C,D,C,A,B,D,B,B,C,B,C,A,D,B,A,D,D,C,D,D,B,B,A,A,A,A,D,C,A,C,C,C,B,C,B,C,A,B,B,C,D,C,B
> 3334401,ALONGNAME,NICOLE,,,B,A,D,D,A,D,B,C,C,A,A,C,C,D,A,C,A,B,B,B,B,A,C,D,C,B,A,D,D,C,D,D,B,C,B,C,C,A,A,C,C,A,D,C,D,A,A,A,D,C,D
> 3363920,SHORT,JOHN,R,,D,C,B,B,A,C,A,D,B,C,B,B,A,C,C,C,C,C,D,B,B,B,A,D,C,B,A,A,D,B,A,B,C,D,D,B,D,C,C,B,B,C,A,B,A,D,B,C,B,D,B
>
> If I could write a script to convert this to our old format, or into
> something I could put into scantronformat.tab, but I think some of the
> other faculty might have trouble with that.
> 1) get the excel file from the office of measurement.
> 2) save it as a csv file
> 3) run this perl/python/whatever script on it.
> 	3a. make sure you have perl/python/whatever, on your system
> 4) upload the output file to loncapa.
>
> Is there a way to enter a line in scantronformat.tab so that it can
> cope with variable length fields?  Or is there an easier way to deal
> with this.
>
> -Jim
>
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