G'n'T Eval

G'n'T Eval is an evaluation suite that allows to carry out pen and paper evaluations. It ships with all necessary tools, i.e. management tools, form creation and printing as well as scanning and creating aggregated results.

Basically it works like this:

The tool is tailored towards university style teaching, i.e. professors giving lectures, tutors holding study groups for that lecture and students attending both. It is currently used to carry out the evaluation of the maths, physics, computer science and astronomy faculties at the university in Heidelberg. About 2000 questionnaires are processed each term (that number is limited by manpower, not by software).

Trying it out

If you want to try the software it is recommended to download a VirtualBox Image that has G'n'T Eval preinstalled. It works out of the box and you can simply point your web browser (not the VirtualBox one) to http://localhost:3000 after starting the image.

Download VirtualBox Image

More information may be found in doc/VIRTUAL_BOX_IMAGE

I need help

If you are stuck anywhere or have questions about the project feel free to open a ticket or write an email to [email protected].

You can have a look at the files in the doc directory of the project, where most of the end-user documentation resides. If this is your first evaluation ever, reading doc/MY_FIRST_EVAL is highly recommended. Apart from that, I have two suggestions:

• Start small. Only involve people that are forgiving if it doesn’t work out immediately.
• Ranking doesn’t help anyone get better at anything. Finding out why someone rules (or sucks) is much more helpful than knowing that she/he does, because you can improve on where you’re lacking. You can’t improve on being #42.

Installation

The installation will take a while due to the large number of dependencies required. If you want to carry it out, you can find details in doc/INSTALL.

Contribution

Please do! If you have suggestions, patches or simply want to report bugs please either open a ticket or write an email to [email protected].

For starters, the project is split up into interconnected parts:

• Web GUI is located in web/ and hosts many files used by other parts of the project. It is also known as seee. Many configuration options may be found in web/config/seee_config.rb. The web GUI is used for operations that apply to a single lecture, professor, etc.
• Operations that work on many things at once are handled in the Rakefile (split into parts in rakefiles/*)
• the optical mark recognition is located in pest/.
• The actual tex class rendering the questionnaires may be found in tex/sheets/tex/latex/eval/eval.cls. The directory structure is required by TeX.
• The result.pdf generation is distributed across many files. A good starting point is web/app/lib/AbstractForm.rb. The visualizers for different question types are located in tex/results. There’s also a readme there that should get you started.
• If you’re looking for something specific but can’t find it, please open a ticket

License

The project is licensed under the permissive ISC license. Dependencies of course remain under their own respective licenses. You can find details about those in doc/ATTRIBUTION. If there are any issues please open a ticket.

About

G'n'T Eval started as Rails project to manage the lectures that should be evaluated but has grown to offer the full stack required to carry out evaluations. While many of the components had names already, the project as a whole didn’t. The parts are listed in order of creation:

• WebGUI: Seee for Siehe, es erleichtert Evaluation or see, it simplifies evaluation. See is German for lake and the name was chosen because all projects of Fachschaft MathPhys refered to bodies of water at that time.
• Optical Mark Recognition: Pest for Practival Evaluation ScripT. Pest is German for the Black Death.
• TeX form generation: Its name is actually Cholera, but it never established. I can’t remember the meaning of the acronym.

Keeping true to the obscure acronym naming as explained in PhD Comic’s Clever Acronyms we came up with the project name:

        .-""-.             G'n'T-Eval
  ⑊    /      \
  │⑊~~~~~~~│   ;           G as in Evaluation
  │ ⑊      │  /            T as in Excellence
  │  ⑊     │-'             and n as in and.
  │   ⑊    │
  │    ⑊   │
  │     ⑊  │
  │      ⑊ │
  │       ⑊│
  └────────┘

Excellence is a reference to the German Universities Excellence Initiative

The following people have contributed and are therefore lovingly called daft by the project (in German, alphabetical order):

• Jasper ist doof
• Oliver ist doof
• Paul ist doof
• Rebecca ist doof
• Stefan ist doof