Executive Summary
Over fifty students every semester are used as teaching
assistants in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at BYU. Because TAs are
so crucial to the “ecosystem of learning” in the mechanical engineering
department, they have to be rated every semester by their students to make sure
that they are performing well enough to be hired again. Students rate their TAs
on a myriad of topics, including friendliness in and out of the classroom,
their knowledge, the quality of their explanations on tough topics, and
professionalism. Students can also give comments on why they answered the
survey the way they did. Before another secretary and I came to the department
office, these surveys were emailed out to over 1,300 students every semester by
hand, through “copy and paste.” After the surveys were sent out, the results
were collected and then processed by hand, and then the results of each survey
were sent to each TA, as well as the TA supervisor. This would take weeks to
accomplish. By automating the email process and the data collection and
summarization process, this task is now done in a few minutes.
The first program sends every student who had a TA in a
Mechanical Engineering class during the semester an email with a link to rate
their TA. The next program adds sheets based on the classes that are offered
for the semester as a place to put the summarized survey results. The main
program talks to Qualtrics through API REST requests. The request downloads raw
data from the server and brings it back as a CSV file. The data is downloaded
in a temporary file, the program alters and summarizes the data, and then
brings the data over to the master spreadsheet. The next program makes the
master spreadsheet bring all of the survey results on one page, and then
another program emails the results out to each TA. After all 5 programs have
been run, the task is complete.
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