What's New in Versions of The Grading Assistant (TGA) ?? ======================================================== Changes made in TGA 4.0 (advance release) ======================= TGA 4.0 was completely rewritten to take advantage of commercial platforms for menus, mouse control, keyboard control, pop-up help, and data entry. Users of earlier versions will notice subtle, but definite changes in the presentation interface. Mouse support is more uniform across all the programs. Pop-up help is available by pressing F1 or both mouse buttons, rather than by pressing ALT+H as in earlier versions. The use of function keys in the menus is eliminated in favor of more modern approaches (typing the highlighted key letter, selecting the menu item with the cursor and ENTER key, or using your mouse). TGA 4.0 has significantly more error-checking code than earlier releases. It is also much larger than previous releases, taking 448K of RAM to run effectively. You'll notice that the program takes longer to load initially, but it runs faster afterwards. You'll notice that now ALL of the reports can be printed, displayed at your PC console, or directed to a DOS file named TGA.OUT. When you run any of the TGA commands, you can pass two parameters to the program -- in any order. One of the parameters can be the disk/path of your data files. The other can be "/C" or "/M" -- to tell TGA to treat your PC as having a Color or Monochrome monitor, respectively. TGA is fairly effective at "guessing" your PC's monitor and display adapter, but since there are so many different types of both, these parameters allow you to tell TGA which to use if the guess-work seems not to work. The TGASETUP program has been dropped. Between the more generic color set chosen, the "/C" and "/M" switches, and the increased ability for TGA to detect your monitor/adapter, you probably do not need TGASETUP anyway. Let me know if I'm wrong. TGA does a better job of handling data and program directories. It now: (1) "remembers" the current directory from which you executed TGA, and returns there when TGA ends; (2) allows you to specify the data directory on the command line as a parameter; and (3) under DOS 3.0 and up, it uses DOS's built-in feature for finding out the program directory on which TGA is stored. TGA now lets you specify your own choice of letter grades (or none at all) and grade ranges. So, if your school uses "U" rather than "F", you can change it in the Scoring Menu. You'll notice that the Utility Menu has been extensively improved. The files list, rename, erase, copy, and other utilities are now much simpler to use. The End-of-Grading-Period Menu now has a new ZAP option that allows you to erase all of last year's grading files to get ready for a new grading year. Many customers requested a minor change in those reports which let you select one or more grading files to be included. These customers had the habit of pressing the ENTER key prematurely and, since TGA's default was to preselect all grading files, they ended up by running a much larger report than they intended. Starting with TGA 4.0, all files are initially NOT selected. You can select all by pressing CTRL and ENTER simultaneously. Individual files can be selected (press INSERT), deselected (press DELETE), or toggled (press SPACE). The TGAINFO main menu has a new option which allows you to print gummed labels for an entire class. As I said earlier, TGA 4.0 is a MAJOR revision to the program, and I think you'll like the new look and feel of the program. Experienced TGA customers won't have to re-learn to use it, however, because it is functionally equivalent to earlier versions. As always, TGA 4.0 is compatible with the Grading files produced with earlier TGA versions. However, the heading and footing files used for the Interim Report are *not* compatible with earlier versions. Please erase your old files (INTERIMS.HDF and INTERIMS.FTF) before using TGA 4.0 to run a new Interim Report. Changes made in TGA 3.5 ======================= This version of TGA enhances your ability to drop low scores. In previous versions, from the Scoring Menu you could enter Yes/No for class grading categories to tell TGA to drop the lowest score or not. Starting with release 3.5, you can enter a number--from zero to nine--telling TGA how many low scores to drop. If you don't want any scores dropped, enter zero (0). For one or more scores to be dropped, simply enter the number to be dropped (1-9). If you have been using a previous version of TGA, you'll notice that it automatically updates your Scoring information by changing 'N' to '0' and 'Y' to '1'. Reminder: TGA only drops the lowest score(s) if a student has more grades for that category than the number to be dropped. A minor change was made to the Class Roster report. The left margin was adjusted three spaces to the right to give you more room to hold-punch it. I wish I could give you more than 3 spaces, but the width of the line can't exceed 80 characters for Epson printers using PICA font. Two additional text editing commands were added for the Interim Report Heading/Footing/Student Comment fields. ALT+J will join two text lines, and ALT+X will clear the text and signal that no text is desired for this entry. The Scoring Menu was updated so that it is easier to enter/update the Type/Percent/Drop items and the Grade items. You can now use the up/down arrows, the TAB key, the ENTER key, SHIFT+TAB, and Page Up/Down keys to select the desired field to enter. Changes made in TGA 3.4 ======================= This version of TGA adds two new features to the End-of-Grading-Period menu. If you inadvertently enter the wrong grading period number when saving your grades for the year-end reports, the menu now has two options to help you. (In other words, suppose you told TGA to save the grade averages as grading period "6" but you meant to enter "5".) Pressing F4 will let you rename the grading period summary file (from "6" to "5" in our example). Pressing F5 will let you erase the unwanted grading summary file ("6" in our example). The TGAGRAPH program now has a third bar graph. It will summarize your class grades by A, B, C, D, and F counts for each class for the year. A new program, TGA2DIFF.EXE, was added. It lets you export your grading files in the data interchange file format (DIFF) for possible use in another PC program. This might be useful if you wish to load your TGA grades to your favorite spreadsheet or database program. Additional error checking was done throughout the program to make it less susceptible to problems beyond TGA's control (such as memory or disk errors). Some of the menus and displays were dressed up a bit purely for aesthetic reasons. Changes made in TGA 3.3 ======================= TGA has added an entirely new way of computing grade averages. In addition to the grade average method (which uses the weighted grade categories identically to earlier versions of TGA), TGA now supports "point averaging". Using point averaging, category weights are ignored and the final average is simply the ratio of the total points a student scored versus the total points possible. See the users manual for more details and an example. I cleaned up and consolidated some of the grade averaging routines so that this version of TGA is actually smaller than version 3.2, even though it has new features. Changes made in TGA 3.2 ======================= Many of you wrote that you loved the new individual student grade average reports, but you wanted to be able to selectively print the reports for certain students. TGA 3.2 now operates like the Interim Report in that you can selectively include/exclude students individually. A slight glitch (that's what programmers call it when they don't want to admit to a software bug) caused the end-of-grading-period save grade averages program not to clear the screen before it asked you to respond to questions. Nothing harmful, but the screen looked cluttered while you were responding to the prompts. That bug is fixed in TGA 3.2. If you told TGA to print a report, but your printer wasn't ready, TGA 3.1 ended abnormally -- rather than simply giving you an error and asking you to continue. This bug was corrected in TGA 3.2. Many of you wrote to say that you wanted to be able to correct those saved grade summary files after the end of the grading period was past and you were in the next one. A new program was added to the end-of-grading-period menu to let you edit these grade files. Just tell TGA which grading period you wish to edit and it will do the rest. Since the Individual Student Report now allows you to select one or more students per class, and omit the rest, the ALT+P feature of the Grading Menu (which printed a copy of the student's grades) has been deleted. Instead of using ALT+P from the Grading Menu, choose the Individual Student Report from the Current Grading Period Reports Menu, and select the student(s) to be printed. The INSTALL program was changed to begin by verifying that the compressed distribution files (TGA-PROG.ZIP and TGA-DOC.ZIP) are valid before continuing with the installation. This prevents the INSTALL program from deleting the old version of TGA (if any) and then aborting while trying to install a new version that was damaged in the mail. Other changes were made to support integration with another software company's product, SIS -- the School Information System. You won't see these changes unless you have the special version designed to work with SIS. But TGA can now output its grade averages for posting in SIS. Changes made in TGA 3.1 ======================= Many customers have been requesting that TGA support more than 30 students per class. This version increases the limit to 45 students. As a result, the grading files will be slightly larger (by about 2,000 characters each). Naturally, TGA is backward compatible to your existing grading files. The first time that you use the Grading Menu and tell TGA to save your changes, the file will automatically be formatted to be able to accommodate 45 students. All of that is transparent to you, and you don't need to do anything special to cause that to happen. This version corrects a minor bug in the end-of-grading-period grading file reset program. Version 3.0 incorrectly blanked student IDs when the grades were reset. This version corrects that, leaving the student IDs as they were. Changes made in TGA 3.0 (Happy New Year) ======================= The last major release in 1989 was 2.4. It was primarily a maintenance release, correcting minor problems. The last 1989 release with major functional changes was version 2.3. With each new year, TGA is released with a higher major version number. (1.0 in 1988, 2.0 in 1989) Releases are typically made quarterly. The first change you will notice is that the menu system was updated to look more current. (Pop-up overlays with shadowing.) No functional improvement, but it makes TGA look more like other current PC products. Since two new reports were added, the Reports Menu was split into two menus -- one for Current Grading Period, and the other for the rest. A new feature was added to the Grading Menu. If you forget the names of your already-defined grading files (meaning that you have already defined them in the Scoring Menu), then you can enter a grading file name of "?" and TGA will pop-up a list of the current file names. Use the cursor to select the desired file from the list. Version 2.4 had a BUG that caused incorrect grade averages if, for a single grade category, you had both extra credit points and you elected to drop the lowest score, and if the number of extra credit points were less than the lowest score for that category. With all of those "ifs", you can see why the program error wasn't detected until recently. TGA 3.0 corrects that bug. Version 2.4 had a minor problem in printing TGAGRAPH screens using the IBM Proprinter mode. This has been corrected. An additional field, the student identification (ID), has been added to the student information in the Grading Menu. When you use the student ID in conjunction with the new Grade Postings report, you can now list current grade averages by student ID, rather than name, for posting grades. The Interim Report program was changed in two ways. First, the report now lists the grade category weights for each category in addition to the information previously shown. Second, you now have the option to selectively exclude students from the printed report. The report programs were modified to accept ESCAPE while printing, and to abort the report on ESCAPE. This allows you to gracefully abort reports if you inadvertently began to print/display them and wish to stop. A minor problem in the mouse menu selection from the Reports Menu was corrected. This problem was not visible if cursor keys were used for menu selection. A new report, the ZERO Grades Listing Report, was added to the Reports Menu. This report is especially useful to schools, such as those who use the Zeros Aren't Permitted (ZAP) program. It lists the zero grades for each student, along with their current grade average. The idea is to let the student see how negatively work not turned in affects his/her grade. A new report, the Individual Student Grades Listing, was added to the Current Period Reports Menu. This report lists all grades for each student in a class. It also shows the current grade average for that class. Changes made in TGA 2.4 ======================= A few minor changes were made to the TGAPRINT program, mostly to simplify the entry or editing of printer controls. The TGASETUP program was changed to allow you to specify the type of display monitor/adapter you have. Some users who had autoswitching adapters had problems with TGAGRAPH. Now, these users can tell TGAGRAPH exactly what type of display system they have. You asked for the ability to specify a minimum grade average for the end-of-grading-period grades. Now, TGA will prompt you to enter the minimum grade to store, and any grades below that level will automatically be increased to it. Changes made in TGA 2.3 ======================= You asked for a simpler INSTALL program. The old INSTALL.BAT program was replaced with a new INSTALL.EXE that: (1) eliminates the DOS error messages that you were asked to ignore in earlier versions, (2) enables you to install TGA on any disk drive (not just A-D as in earlier versions), (3) lets you pick your own disk path (not limited to TGA as in earlier versions) You wanted to be able to run TGA from a DOS PATH, without having to switch to the TGA software directory first. Version 2.3 automatically detects its software disk/path and changes to that directory (so long as you are running DOS 3.0 or higher). For DOS versions below 3.0, you first must change to the disk/path in which TGA resides. (Sorry, but that is DOS's limitation, not TGA's...) You wanted an easier way to enter new grading file names in the Scoring Menu. Version 2.3 automatically remembers the names of newly created grading files. When you enter the Scoring Menu, TGA asks you if you wish to load these file names automatically. You asked for more features in the Scoring Menu for inserting and deleting grading file entries. Pressing F3 or F4 from the Scoring Menu now adds or removes these entries. You wanted a report that listed the students and grades for a class. A new report (see F3 on the Reports Menu) was added to do this. You wanted to be able to print copies of the bargraphs TGAGRAPH displays. With TGA 2.3 you can print them easily on your IBM Graphics, IBM ProPrinter, or Epson FX dot matrix printer. You wanted more flexibility in the Interim Report. Now TGA 2.3 lets you enter your own report heading and footing information (up to ten lines each). Minor changes were also made in the Interim Report format to accommodate this new feature. Many of the TGA prompts were updated to be more forgiving of your inputs. For example, older versions of TGA didn't like a DOS path entered with a final backslash (\). This version understands what you mean, and it ignores the final backslash.