I've used spreadsheets a couple of semesters because of my complicated point scheme with different weights for written homework, exams, loncapa exercises, etc. I create a student-level template with the formulas to use. They are very powerful.
They work like an excel spreadsheet, so you can program formulas to calculate the points to assign for a given problem. If you want to give different points depending on the number of trials, you can find that information and enter a formula. For example, a homework problem from a previous course shows this spreadsheet table (cells are denoted by blanks and this will run over a couple rows of the e-mail message, but in loncapa it is one wide row): 72 Homework Problem 1. Interpolation correct Tries: 2 Timestamp: 1389119141 TueJan713:25:412014 Duedate: 1389366000 FriJan1010:00:002014 Attempted Parts: 1 Solved Parts: 1 You can see the number of tries and the solved parts. So to give partial credit, just create a formula to use in one of the extra columns provided. I used columns for the different categories of material, and then you can sum the columns at the top of the sheet. You can enter formulas to include the weights for the different categories. You must enter the formula for each resource that you want to treat this way. I created a screencast to show students how to read the sheet: https://connect.msu.edu/loncapa-grades/ I encountered a minor bug that occurred when I copied my course from one semester to the next. Some cells were not completely null in the copy, and the '&NUM', '&SUBMIN' functions were compromised, but I know Stuart Raeburn worked on that and I have not tested subsequently. I'm not using it this semester because I decided to use i>clickers and transferring loncapa stuff to the MSU d2l system was less work than importing a lot of i>clicker data into loncapa. This is a very powerful tool. To make it more useful, it would be good if 1) (minor issue) the header could be static so it was visible when working in rows far from the header; 2) (major issue) the row numbers and resource names were visible when working far to the right if in column z for example; 3) (minor issue) The table columns all lined up. Currently each folder is a separate table so that there are many tables of different widths so the columns don't line up through the entire course; 4) They integrated with i>clickers used here at MSU. Carl Lira Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science 2527 Engineering Building 428 S. Shaw Lane Michigan State University East Lansing, MI 48824-1226 Phone: (517) 355-9731 FAX: (517)432-1105 http://www.egr.msu.edu/~lira http://chethermo.net <http://chethermo.net/> -----Original Message----- From: lon-capa-users-boun...@mail.lon-capa.org [mailto:lon-capa-users-boun...@mail.lon-capa.org] On Behalf Of Mills, Douglas G Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2015 1:38 PM To: Discussion list for LON-CAPA users Cc: Mills, Douglas G Subject: Re: [LON-CAPA-users] automatically decrease point value with number of attempts Hi All, Thank you Peter and Mark. Excuse the basic question on spreadsheets, but I'm not finding this addressed anywhere. Is there only one Assessment spreadsheet per course? .... _______________________________________________ LON-CAPA-users mailing list LON-CAPA-users@mail.lon-capa.org http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/listinfo/lon-capa-users