At the start of the development of ARCADE, the author was not aware of the availability of any other generally applicable coursework management software. However, perhaps the most obvious apparent alternative is the Ceilidh system from Nottingham University ([Benford,1993]). Whilst the author does not have an intimate knowledge of Ceilidh (and sincerely apologizes if this relative ignorance leads to a misrepresentation in this paper), the two systems do appear to be completely different at first glance.
The most obvious difference is the order of priority of the developments. One gets the impression that Ceilidh started as software for the automatic marking of programs, then became able to manage programming laboratories, and then was generalized to be capable of managing other types of course. If we consider that by such development a system can eventually run an entire bounded world, then certainly one could observe the two systems starting at opposite corners and progressing across the floor of such a world. A concrete example of this difference is that ARCADE runs deadlines automatically (and they are different for the different groups of students, and can be systematically extended and further extended), but has absolutely no `knowledge' of the actual work done by the students, except for the title of each exercise. In contrast, Ceilidh is given intimate knowledge of the exercises (in the sense that it can then mark them), but the deadlines are published as text rather than held as data, are the same for all students, and are enforced by the appropriate person actually pushing the `deadline' button at the publicized time.
There must be a reason for this difference, and the author suspects it is simply a result of the project developers starting from different places. ARCADE was developed by a laboratory manager whose job it was to manage a whole year-full of different modules with different types of work associated with them. Whilst he was also involved in marking work in some particular modules, it was the management job he was trying to automate. One might expect an admission that the original motivation behind Ceilidh was the same in general - to reduce workload - but the development was started by someone trying to avoid marking programs, rather than avoid shuffling lists of names, chasing naughty students and adding up numbers!
In that sense, they are the same. And, despite being apparently different in detail, they both succeed because they take an existing manual system which works and automate a part of it in a way so that it still works, but works faster and/or with less effort.
This success is enhanced by another (subjective) factor which they both share: the `big brother' syndrome. The theory here is that the students (by and large) work more efficiently than they might otherwise do, simply because they feel that their department is able to effectively monitor them, and they want to get good marks.
Another obvious difference between the two systems is that Ceilidh is further developed and more highly polished than ARCADE - Ceilidh started in 1988, has had many people working on it and has had some external funding. It is hence freely available and ready to use. By contrast, the developer of ARCADE is just one man, who does not even have a dog!