Senior Project - AMESS

The University of Colorado Department of Applied Mathematics, part of the College of Engineering and Applied Science, provides the majority of the math courses taken by engineering students. Two of the largest courses, Calculus III and Differential Equations, include three large labs throughout the semester. These labs make up a significant amount of the semester's work, and students are permitted to work in groups with students from other recitations and/or sections of the class. This has made collecting, grading, and returning the labs an administrative problem for the department, with little possibility of feedback or detecting cheating among different groups.

This project is a web-based system for submitting math labs. Students may submit labs individually or with group members in other recitations, and instructors and teaching assistants can easily grade group labs and assign grades and feedback to each student. The system is capable of reading files from SIS (the University's Student Information System), allowing standard class rosters to be uploaded to create classes, student logins, and assignments with a minimal amount of effort. In addition, the system provides a cheating detection module which can be run on any number of current and past assignments to check the correlation between submitted labs. The results are published in a statistical format, allowing instructors to investigate labs with high correlation for possible cheating. Finally, the system provides a lab search engine to look for specific text in labs, customizable content including the login page and help pages, and the ability to send email notifications to users.

The system also has standard web interface extras such as session timeouts, maintenance pages for users, classes, and assignments, and logging. It was developed using PHP for the web application, a MySQL database, and Java for the cheating detection module. This allows the system to be installed on almost any UNIX-variant operating system.