Marking Projects: Using Line Notes

Now, we will want to start marking one of the projects in our session. To do that, I will have to define some data that will be used to calculate the marks for each project. That data is contained in line notes.

The line notes that we create within a session can be used multiple times accross any file in any project in my session. We know that there are a few things that are common for all projects. For example, we would like to give a demerit if the student's output was incorrect. So, we can make a line mark for that.

Select "Add A Note To The Session" from the toolbar of the Gild Marker View. You will be presented with a dialog. On the left, there is a tree viewer containing an outline of the scheme we are using. On the right, there are a number of input fields. You can use the tree on the left to select the section with which our note is to be associated; our new note will be associated with the root: "Assignment 1". The fields on the right set various attributes for the note. Fill out the fields so that the dialog looks as follows:

Select "OK". You will notice that this note has been added to the line notes pane at the bottom of the Gild Marker View.

There may be a number of other common things that we would like to note: one-off errors in the For Loop and While Loop sections; good/bad style in the Comments section; etc. Below is a picture of what the line notes pane at the bottom of the Gild Marker View, after several of these kinds of notes have been added.

Now that these line notes have been created, we can use them to mark the projects in our workspace. We will start with Assignment1.A. Make sure that it is the current project by selecting "Set Current Project > Assignment1.A" from the Gild Marker View's local menu. Now, open Assignment1.A's AssignmentOne.java using the Gild Editor. Then, simply drag-and-drop, from the line note pane, the notes that you would like to apply to this file. Below is a screenshot of the entire Gild Perspective, after several notes have been applied to AssignmentOne.java.

Let's take a closer look at the Gild Marker View:

Notice how the overview pane has changed. It now includes all of the line notes that we have added. Also, the scores for each of the sections has been updated as well.

Also notice how the title of the view has been decorated with an asterisk (*). This prompts us to let us know that something in our session has changed, and we should save the session. We do so by selecting the "Save This Session" button on the Gild Marker View toolbar. Since this is the first time we will have saved this session, we will be given a "Save As.." dialog box. Save the session to any file that you would like.

After the session has been saved, you will notice that a file called "marks.mxm" has been added to the Assignment1.A and Assignment1.B projects. These files contain all of the marking information for the project in which it is contained. If the student who submitted the assignment has Gild, this file can be sent back to him or her for review. Otherwise, from within the Gild Resource View, we may right-click on this file and select "Write HTML Marks File" from the context menu. A new file--marks.html--will be written and can be viewed from within any web browser.