Project 2 - A Grade Calculator

Due - Monday, October 23, 2006

The goal of this project is to give you experience using iteration, file i/o, classes, and lists. You will write a program that reads from a file each student's project and exam scores, builds a database of the information, calculates the final course grade for each student, and determines the minimum, maximum, and average grades for the class. The output of your program will be a text file containing the name and final grade for each student, the names and grades of the students with the minimum score and maximum score, and the average score of the class.

The input file from which your program will read will contain one line for each student. Each line will have nine space-delineated fields denoting the name, project 1 score, project 2 score, project 3 score, project 4 score, exam 1 score, exam 2 score, exam 3 score, and participation score. Each field will have an identifier denoting the field, followed by a colon, followed by the value. An example would look as follows:

Name:Bob proj1:80 proj2:76 proj3:67 proj4:99 exam1:70 exam2:80 exam3:88 participation:100
Your program will read each line from the file, parse it to extract the name and scores, and create a Student object containing the name and scores for that student. As each student object is created, it should be appended to a list that holds the collection of student objects. Once the file has been processed, your program will calculate the grade for each student as well as the min, max, and average grades for the class. Finally, your program will save the calculated information to a new text file.

Grades should be calculated as follows:

Implementation Requirements and Hints

  1. Begin by mapping out the design of your program. You will probably want to have a Student class that stores the name and individual scores for a student and can calculate the final grade for that student. You should also consider implementing a Student DB class that stores the list of Student objects and can calculate the min, max, and average grades for the entire class. Think carefully about where the file input and output functionality should be implemented and make sure that you can justify all parts of your design.
  2. Make sure to implement and test your program in small increments. For example, you can begin by implementing a program that opens the file, reads in the data, and extracts and prints the appropriate information. Next, implement the Student and StudentDB classs. Then, merge the two pieces such that you store the extracted data in the appropriate objects rather than simply printing it. Finally, implement the logic to calculate the min/max/avg.
  3. You should refer to the python library reference (http://docs.python.org/lib/string-methods.html) for information about parsing strings. In particular, you will probably need the split method.

Extra Credit Opportunity

For extra credit, allow the user to view and make changes to the student information. You will need to implement a menu that allows the user to select which information he/she wants to view or change.

Due 1:30PM Monday October 23, 2006

  1. Complete and submit your working code. Turn in a hard copy in class and place a copy of your .py file in the submit directory /home/submit/cs110/username.
  2. Make sure that each function is well documented. Your documentation should specify the type and function of the input parameters and output.
  3. Run your program on a variety of inputs ensuring that all error conditions are handled correctly.
Note: No portion of your code may be copied from any other source including another text book, a web page, or another student (current or former). You must provide citations for any sources you have used in designing and implementing your program.
Sami Rollins