The SAM Upload Tool (SUT) can be reached at sam-up.math.ethz.ch. Please contact sam-up@math.ethz.ch if you are the head assistant of a lecture and want to use the tool.
The student interface is accessible to students (within the ETH network, e.g., with VPN). Each student can upload their solution for specific exercise sheet. After uploading one or multiple documents the student sees a list of all files they’ve currently uploaded. They can remove the files and download a zip of their submission for safe keeping.
Once a TA has uploaded a corrections, a green banner appears at the top of the list of submitted files. The page then looks something like this.
The TA interface is only available to TAs. A TA is only shown the submissions of their students. They can download them in bulk or individually. They can upload their corrections. A tick will be displayed if anything has been uploaded. A cross will be displayed if the most recent submission of the student has not been downloaded by anyone.
Filenames are restricted to alphanumeric letters, dots and underscores and hyphens. In particular spaces are not permitted. Relaxing this condition is very dangerous, since even if SUT escapes all filenames properly, there is no such guarantee for backup scripts or any scripts a TA might write.
If the student code requires filenames with banned characters, they can upload an archive instead.
Folders can not be uploaded easily using PHP. Therefore, if the student needs to upload an entire folder they must upload an archive instead.
SUT will deny access to anyone without an internal IP. Hence VPN is required to access the server from outside the ETH network.
SUT authenticates user by their
nethz credentials.
student interface requires that the student is subscribed to an exercise group on mystudies.
TA interface requires that the TA is assigned to a group on edoz. TAs will only have access to the submission of students in their exercise group. Organizers can also be given access, see Setup.
admin interface is only granted to those in
config/admin.json.
If you’re an organizer of a lecture and you want to use SUT, you should contact sam-up@math.ethz.ch with the following information:
A list with all the submission entities you need, e.g. Serie 1, …, Serie 13 plus Fokusprojekt 1-5. This depends on the needs of your lecture.
A list of all nethz account names of people allowed to see all
submissions. Typically this is the organizer and sometimes the lecturer.
The nethz account name is your ETH username, e.g. lucg for
Luc Grosheintz. You do not need to list all TAs since the tool has
access to them through an interface to edoz.
After you’ve been informed that everything is set up, you should inform the TAs and students.
Please also ensure that all TAs are correctly assigned to their exercise classes on edoz. Please remind the students that they need to pick an exercise class on mystudies in order to be permitted to hand in their assignments.
SUT has the following features to help settle disputes:
history SUT stores a submission history in each
submission folder, this shows when a student uploaded or deleted a file.
This record is stored in .submission-log.json. Furthermore,
if the student resubmits a file, that original file is moved to a
dot-file with a (partly) random suffix. Deleted files must be deleted,
since otherwise a student can lock themselves out by uploading several
large files which in total exceed their quota. There is also a log of
when the TAs upload their correction. The log files are included in the
archive and are thus visible the other party.
checksums students can download the archive the
TA downloads. This enables them to check that everything has arrived
properly on the server, i.e. they are responsible for checking important
submissions. They can even keep the archive as proof in case someone
disputes what they uploaded. To prevent students from modifying the
archive after downloading it, SUT stores a checksum (SHA256) of every
archive a student requests. Therefore, one can check if the archive a
students presents us with has been tampered with. The checksums are
located in the folder checksums.
