In Fall 2007, I graded two sections of Math 132 (Calculus II). After assigning a mark to each paper for a given homework, I found myself with the dilemma of how to enter the grades most efficiently. If I used a spreadsheet program I would have to search for the appropriate row to enter each student's grade, which seemed like a waste of effort given the large number of students. So instead, I entered the grades into text files using a comma-separated format in the order I read them off the papers, like

Joe Sixpack, 3
Ethel Tolbert, 8

which was quicker (I touch type). To avoid errors in typing the names, I wrote a program that would perform a primitive form of spell-checking (more than sufficient for this simple situation). The professor wanted the grades displayed in a table, so I also added that ability. Here are the files relating to the course. grading.py contains my grading utilities. namerandomizer.py is what I used to replace the actual students' names with pseudonyms (for the purpose of posting them here) to protect their privacy. The files named hw*sec* are the grades for a given section on a given homework. The files named section*names are the student names. And the files named sec*grades are the tabulated grades.