gscdash

Gradescope-Canvas Dashboard

The Computer and Information Science Department at Penn is building cross-departmental monitoring tools to help with advising and student support.

Our goal is a single aggregation point for tracking student progress (and triggering alarms as appropriate) across many courses. Ultimately there will be both "pull" and "push" components (messages vs dashboard).

We pull from both the Gradescope and Canvas APIs.

Getting Started

This library requires a bit of setup to ensure it crawls Gradescope and Canvas appropriately.

1. Copy config.yaml.default to config.yaml
2. Log into Canvas, go into Account, Settings, and create a New Access Token (give it a name like "Canvas Monitoring") and copy the key.
3. Update the config.yaml as follows:

• Change the YAML key gradescope / gs_login to the Gradescope email address of an account given instructor permission on the courses you want to monitor.
• Update gradescope / gs_pwd to the password for above account.
• Update canvas / api_key to the new Canvas access token you created above.
• Set site to your Canvas host URL (e.g., https://canvas.upenn.edu for Penn)

Optionally you'll want to restrict the courses to a subset of the available ones:

• canvas / course_ids: a list of specific Canvas course IDs to crawl, rather than all that are currently active. Each should be on a separate line indented with a leading dash
• gradescope / semesters: a list of the Gradescope "years" / semesters to crawl

Then set up and run the environment:

python -m venv venv # Create a virtual environment
chmod +x venv/bin/activate # Make the activate script executable
source venv/bin/activate # Activate the virtual environment
pip install -r requirements.txt # Install dependencies
python collect_events.py # Run the script

After the script runs, there should be a series of files in the current directory:

• gs_courses.csv / canvas_courses.csv: list of courses to which we have access
• gs_assignments.csv / canvas_assignments.csv: list of student assignments (quizzes, exams, HWs)
• gs_students.csv / canvas_students.csv: list of enrolled students by course_id
• gs_extensions.csv / canvas_student_summaries.csv: list of student info including late days, extensions, etc.
• gs_submissions.csv / canvas_submissions.csv: list of homework submissions including timestamps, whether late, etc.

Alternatively, you can use the libraries directly:

import pandas as pd
from gscdash.pycanvas.pycanvas import CanvasStatus
from gscdash.pyscope.pyscope import GradescopeStatus

# Restrict to these course IDs
canvas_course_list = []

# Restrict to these semesters
gradescope_sem_list = []

canvas = CanvasStatus(canvas_url, canvas_api_key, canvas_course_list)
canvas_courses, all_students, all_assignments, all_submissions, all_student_summaries = canvas.get_course_info()

gs = GradescopeStatus(email, pwd, gradescope_sem_list)
gs_courses, gs_students, gs_assignments, gs_submissions, gs_extensions = gs.get_course_info()

Potential To-Dos:

• Add download from Gradescope Review Similarity for each assignment?
• Generate ics for all deadlines?

Gradescope APIs

We leverage and adapt the pyscope API, which we have updated to 2023 Gradescope with extensions. Gradescope does not really have an external API, but through some clever work by prior authors, HTML crawling is used to pull the important data and wrap it in objects.

Credit: The pyscope codebase is derived from Sagar Reddy Patil's Gradescope iCalendar Converter, sagarredypatil/gradescope-ics, which also leverages the original Gradescope codebase from Anton Pozharski, apozharski/gradescope-api. This overall package inherits the AGPL license as a result of this. However, new subsystems use the standard Apache 2 license.

Major changes:

• Support for extracting courses for which we have either instructor or student access. Instructor access has more comprehensive support, e.g., of downloading rosters.
• Instructor access uses the full assignments page rather than the main dashboard, for comprehensiveness. This requires changes to parsing.
• New course.get_roster() API call.
• Roster extraction update to match the 2023 HTML formatting of Gradescope.
• Homework assignment extraction now pulls the assignment ID.
• Extraction of homework submissions.
• Extraction of homework extensions.

Canvas APIs

We leverage the Canvas LTI APIs from the U of Florida library. Substantial layering over these libraries has been added in the pycanvas package, and a common API between the Canvas and Gradescope modules has been implemented as CourseApi.