Making Exams on Your Own Computer

If you wish to make the exams on your own computer rather than using the Departmental servers, you can build the software if you can handle Unix/Linux commands and emacs. You will still need to get files from the Department machines or from the University's pages, however, and you will need to execute the printing from shell.physics.rutgers.edu.

If you are having the answers on the cover sheet, you probably want to still use the Department Ricoh machines to scan the sheets. The scanning procedures are C++ based, but the grading routines are in very old fortran.

Producing the exams

• Make a directory for making the software and producing the exams. Let's call it makeexams . If you have a directory for composing grtex exams, this might be a sister directory to keep things separated.
• Download a copy of grtexWLBL.tar.
• untar grtexWlabel.tar in the makeexams directory
  • cd makeexams
  • tar xvf grtexWlabel.tar
• You will need these c++ programs, for which source is included. So execute
  • g++ -c csvdiv.cpp
  • g++ -c getaline.cpp
  • g++ -o breakgrtex breakgrtex.cpp getaline.o
  • g++ -o makestudlbl makestudlbl.cpp getaline.o csvdiv.o
  • g++ -o makeIndivLtx makeIndivLtx.cpp getaline.o csvdiv.o
• [This step is necessary only if you want to get the pictures and roster yourself, rather than download them from a Departmental server.]
  • You will need the program jpeg2ps. It is available from https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/jpeg2ps as jpeg2ps-1.8.zip. unzip it and make. I got a warning message on my fedora Linux machine, but it seemed OK.
    
  • Then you will need to get the pictures, probably one at a time, from the roster for your course, and get the roster itself.
  • Open the roster for your course from REGIS https://sims.rutgers.edu/rosters/, with Section all, checking “Alphabetical roster”. Click on Comma Separated Values and save as mycourse.csv. Then remove the (four) header lines, so there are only the one line for each student.
  • Make a subdirectory pix to put the pictures in.
  • Left click on each student's name on the roster page, and "Save Link as" with name changed to .jpg, where is the nine digit ID. e.g. 123009876.jpg, and put them in the pix subdirectory.
  • Then cd pix, and convert them to .eps . You can do that with
    cd .. (back to makeexams), and then source doit
    Then pix will contain *.eps files for each student, eg. 146003679.eps.
• Alternatively, if you have access to the Department servers' files /home/sysmgmnt/registration/rosters and /home/sysmgmnt/registration/eps, you need to copy or link your xxx.csv into the makeexams directory. You need to link the Department's /home/sysmgmnt/registration/eps to the subdirectory pix or copy the pictures you need into that directory.
  [Note: If your course has multiple sections but you are only doing a subset of these, you need to select only your students from xxx.csv, and delete the others from that file.]
• You need to have, in directory makeexams:
  • The output of grtex, a single tex file with all versions, each with an \input cover. A Sample (real used exam) is in sample.e .
  • the cover sheet that gets input. It must include the lines
    • \input studlabel
    • \input lbltempl
    a sample is here, in the file cover
  • the lbltempl.tex file, from the tar file
  • a file tail. It is ok if it is empty
Here is what to do after the compiles above:
• breakgrtex sample.e. This will make the multiple versions (4 here).
• makestudlbl samp.csv homestud 51
  This makes homestud, an extract from the roster file. It starts numbering at 51, which is unusual. Leaving out the last argument will start numbering at 101, as is usual.
• makeIndivLtx sample 4 464 homestud tests
  This makes the individual exams and places them in subdirectory tests, which must have been either be nonexistent or empty beforehand.
• This can then be printed (after this gets tested out) by logging onto shell.physics.rutgers.edu, cd'ing to the directory in which makeIndivLtx was executed, and executing
  ./sendprint.sh homestud tests and then authenticating with /usr/local/bin/lpauth .

  Scanning the Exams

  If you are using with the answer form on the cover page, you will need to use the programs scanExam and insertnames as described in Scanning Exam Answer Sheets. You may have needed to generate the forms as well, using makeforms. These can be built from the tar file grtexScan.tar.

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  Last modified: Wed Oct 17 14:16:41 2018