next up previous contents
Next: The sheet columns Up: A summary of ARCADE Previous: Scaling factor   Contents

The system

Now the easy-to-use system that implements the above.

There is a printed laboratory sheet for every session of every laboratory. These are stored in a ring-binder, which you obtain at the start of each laboratory session from a central filing cabinet, and return it at the end. Each sheet contains the names of the students that in theory should be there. All the information relating to that session and the deadline associated with that session (including marks etc.) is eventually written by you on that one sheet (more accurately, over several printed versions of the sheet). Some of this data is added in the corresponding session (e.g. attendance), some in the next session, and less commonly, some even later.

The early sessions for some course units will have a `Non-Registered' group. This will contain all the people who do not take the course unit. The idea here is to minimize the amount of chaos caused by students swapping their options in the early part of a semester. If there is a `Non-Registered' group, then the name of every student known to ARCADE (in the appropriate database) appears somewhere on the sheets - this leads to much less chaos than the alternative of adding a student by hand at the bottom of a sheet. Thus, if your course unit has this feature then please do not add names by hand, except for those students who do not appear at all (e.g. those from other schools).

If a student appears in the wrong laboratory group (including `Non-Registered') then fill in their details as usual on the sheet on which they appear, but tell the student to contact the Laboratory Manager to get their laboratory group changed. Worse still, if a student does not appear in any laboratory group, then add their details on the current group sheet and again tell the student to contact both the Laboratory Manager and the School Office - it is possible that they are not registered for any courses!

Regularly during the week, the team of data-entry demonstrators takes the folders from the filing cabinets and enters the data on-line. The hand-written data gets replaced by laser-printed data.

Please don't use a black pen when adding data to the sheets containing laser-printed data: your additions are very likely to be missed. This would then cause chaos which you would ultimately have to sort out! A red pen is definitely the best.

Sessions which don't have a deadline have only an attendance column, the others have attendance and 5 more columns.



Subsections
next up previous contents
Next: The sheet columns Up: A summary of ARCADE Previous: Scaling factor   Contents
John Latham 2008-10-30