Retrieving student data from wqslogs

comments or questions to Carl Eberhart carl@ms.uky.edu

When a student logs into WQS, the records of his/her actions are noted and stored in a directory in ~wqs/logdirs. The actions are

LOGIN, SURVEY, SELECTION, SCORE, RESULT, and COMMENT. Retrieving the information and presenting it in a usable form is the task performed by wqscan.pl, which is included in the zipfile above. Put this in your path, make it executable with the command

chmod u+x wqscan.pl

and use it in several ways, which are hinted at in the short help page obtained by executed the command line

perl5 -S wqscan.pl -h

wqscan.pl can be used to access an individual student's records, but it is more convenient to have the wqslogin of each student in your class in a file called say ma322005. Then to get everything your class has done, use the command

perl5 -S wqscan.pl -r -a -html -c ma322005 > everything.html

Use Netscape to view everything.html. The flags -r -a and -html cause certain data to be reported.

-html causes an html table of comments to be printed.

-r causes a table of rights and misses to individual question numbers to be printed ( in html when -html is also present).

-a causes an activity table of selections, results, comments (counts only) to be printed out ( in html when -html is also present).

There are several restriction flags to refine the output:

-f mm/dd/yy only reports data stored on or after the date mm/dd/yy.

-l mm/dd/yy only reports data stored on or before the date mm/dd/yy.

-d h only reports data stored during a login in hour h.

-e h only reports data not stored during a login in hour h.

-t "title fragment" only reports data stored about a homework whose title contains "title fragment".

Examples

To post comments made by your ma322005 class on a particular homework (say the one with Chapter 8-9 in its title) , use the command

perl5 -S wqscan.pl -t "Chapter 8-9" -html ma123015 > comments.html

Use the Netscape Composer to edit in your responses to the comments and then post them for students to read.

To review a particular student's (say pulceer) wqs activity over a period (say 2/11/99 to 2/25/99) exclusive of class time (say 10), use the command

perl5 -S -f 2/11/99 -l 2/25/99 -e 10 -a -r pulceer | more