Having spent 5 years taking courses in the Computing Science department at Simon Fraser University, I’ve become pretty familiar with the various web applications used to track course projects, submit assignments, etc.  Over the same five years, I’ve seen numerous technological changes, both in the “outside world” and within the University.  For example, not too long ago, SFU switched to a central authentication service aptly named “Central Authentication Service” (or CAS).  It’s a pretty nice service, with a snazzy login screen (below).

It’s not only snazzy, but a pretty useful system.  I even integrated one of my school projects (an online grade tracking application) with it without any external support.  Let’s contrast that with the current login screen for “Gradebook”, an application developed by the CS department and used in most CS courses to track grades

Ok, not as snazzy, but here’s the really frustrating thing:  My account here is NOT the same as my SFU computing account!

The “Gradebook” system also includes an electronic assignment submission server

(BTW: This is only a small snapshot of the page)

Sure, it isn’t snazzy looking, but it’s simple and to the point (+10 points).  However, it comes with a few caveats: I have to use my “Gradebook” account, not my (so-called) “universal” SFU account (-25 points), and ALL submissions must be in ZIP, GZIP or RAR format (-25 points)!  For many of my courses, the electronic submission has been a single file, and the instructor often has to email the students to remind them that they have to wrap their single PDF file (or Word Doc, etc.) in a ZIP file to upload it.  I can understand the benefits as far as storage space, and bandwidth consumption, but wouldn’t that be better achieved by simply placing a size restriction and allowing any file to be uploaded?  Plus, when I do login, I get a page with a drop-down list of courses.  Here’s the contents:

See that scrollbar?  Yeah… I’m not registered in anywhere near that many courses (the one course I’m registered in is a few scrolls away), but it would appear the submission server doesn’t know that.

It doesn’t end with the student interface.  In a course on “Web Information Systems,” we were required to develop a web-based application of some sort, and my group chose to build a grade tracking system (partly out of frustration with the current system).  Before starting the project, we organized a meeting with our instructor to find out what his frustrations were with the existing “Gradebook” system used by the department.  He mentioned that instructors had to rebuild the structure of assignments, exams and their relative contributions to the final grade every time they created a course.  He continued to show us a tool he developed which allowed him to create more detailed marks, give comments, and build an email to send off to the student.  He had to build a custom tool to perform tasks which I would consider essential to a modern grade tracking system.  In a few weeks, we hammered out a “school project quality” system running on Ruby on Rails (ASP.Net MVC wasn’t out yet :P) which supported all the features we discussed in our meeting with the prof.

Granted, I know it’s not as simple to fix as it is to complain.  But, with the tools out there, and the number of open-source and commercial courseware products, I still don’t really understand why we’re using a system with so many annoying issues…

For the CS students (or recent grads) who read my blog, is my experience atypical?  Or are your school services as out of date as these?