Presentation

Roger is an automated grading system for computer programming projects. Although specialized for R scripts, Roger can easily be adapted to grade code in other interpreted or compiled programming languages, thanks to its flexibility and modularity.

At the root of the system, Roger relies on Unix shell scripts to grade the correctness of the output of a program. The companion R package provides additional tools to grade the coding style and documentation of R scripts.

Roger is actively used for grading at École d’actuariat of Université Laval.

Features

The system is based on the concept of grading criteria such as the Computer Science Program Grading Criteria of Arkansas State University. Roger takes care of the objective criteria such as output correctness, coding style or the presence of certain documentation elements (assessing their content and quality documentation is left to humans).

• Multiplatform — the base system is built on Bash shell scripts and standard Unix tools. (Requires MSYS2 or Git Bash on Windows.)

• Extensive support for projects maintained and handed in via Git repositories — bulk repository cloning; validation and grading of the structure of the repositories; publication of the results directly in the repositories.

• Versatile grading system based on unit tests — you provide the tests, Roger takes care of their execution and compiles the results.

• Flexible structure to grade any number of files for any number of characteristics, each for any number of grading criteria — you create the grading map using a simple syntax not unlike YAML and Roger takes care of the rest.

• Project validation using the included validation tool — students can check that their project meets the requirements before they hand in their work. Students and instructors alike save a lot of tears and unnecessary stress.

• Modularity of the grading and validation tools — you may rely on the included grading and validation modules or write your own.

• Integrated grading and validation modules for R scripts, R Markdown documents, Shiny apps, R packages and shell scripts.

• Checks on the integrity of every file: name, contents, character encoding, code validity.

• Multilingual — the system is currently entirely available in English and French.

Components

Roger is formed of two independent components.

• roger-base provides the shell scripts that form the foundations of the system.

• The R package roger provides an interface to the shell scripts and tools to grade the coding style and documentation of R scripts.

Authors

• David Beauchemin: ideation and first grading scripts.

• Samuel Fréchette: R interface to the shell scripts.

• Vincent Goulet: shell scripts and maintainer of the project.

• Jean-Christophe Langlois: R package linters.

License

Roger is Free Software distributed under the GNU GPL version 2 or above.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome for new functionalities, extensions to other programming languages, translations, or simply bug report. Join us on GitLab.