Project Assignment Tool Author: Carl Sandrock

1. Introduction

This directory contains tools to assign students to projects. To use it, you need to have the following tools installed:

• GNU make
• glpk (this is what ends up solving the question).
• python
• jinja2 for html report templating

I have set up some conventions for naming projects so that the system can infer information from the project names. Each project consists of letters followed by numbers. The letters are assumed to be names or initials of the project leaders and the numbers are assumed to give the project number. The numbers do not have to be in any particular order and may have gaps, although there is an option to use the order of projects to infer a "lecturer preference".

When you get the project, make sure that all the executables are runnable, by running

$ make executable

2. The process

In overview, the assignment process is

• Place constraints on assignments for lecturers and projects
• Get choices from students
• Compile choices into one table
• Solve the linear programming problem
• Post process the data

2.0 Set up information files

All of the project's files will live in "module directory". Choose a name that makes sense to you. I use modulename_year. All the files you read about here will be relative to the module directory. The students selections will go in the "selections" directory and the output of the program will go in the "output" directory.

You can use the "modulebase" directory as a template. It already has the right directories and a couple of example files in it. The CSV python module is used to parse these files, so they should be fine to edit with spreadsheet programs. The CSV files are referred to as "tables", as there is a long-term plan to move this information to a database.

Module tables: Table name Required fields Example content lecturers Code,Min,Max PV,1,2 students Number,Name,Mark s29232232,POGGENPOEL K,90 projects Code,Min,Max,Title PV1,0,1,"Short title" preassigned Code,Number PV1,s29232232

parameters is a special table that contains Name,Value fields for internal parameters of the program. Look at assignment.mod for details on what they mean.

Example: Name,Value markc,1 markm,0.01 studentweight,0.95

Output tables: selections assignments

2.1 Fill in information

Edit the CSV files constraints.dat so that they reflect the constraints and paramaters correctly.

2.2 Get choices from students

You can use the website to generate these files as well.

TODO: Update this document to reflect the correct workflow from the website.

To get choices from students, you modify the projectchoices.xls file from the template. Important points to remember are that the checks in the spreadsheet use named ranges -- you need to define these ranges correctly in the spreadsheet for it to work. I also recommend that you protect the spreadsheet to avoid accidental changes. Don't bother with a protect password -- you can crack it in minutes and you'll probably forget it.

Now, each student fills in this file and hands it in in some way. You then place one file per student sXXXX.xls in the "selections" directory.

If you want to rename directories created by a ClickUP zip file, download the class list from the class tool and save it somewhere. Now go into selections and execute "../bin/renamefromfile somewhere". This should rename from the long directory names to student number based directory names.

You can also have them send an e-mail, which you can download by doing make selections. Modify the file bin/downloadmailattachments.py to change how the mails are handled.

2.3 Solve the linear programming problem and postprocess the data

Run

$ module=XXX make

This will compile all the selections, solve the problem and do post processing, placing the result in assignments.csv. A nice report is in report.html.

3. Analysis

FIXME: Not working at the moment

The "analyse" script does parameter sweeps to determine the average unhappiness of the students with various parameters designed to meet the needs of the lecturers.