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The most usual way to inform students of their marks/grades is the publication of lists of marks. This action may violate the principle of privacy by making public personal data of students. SWAD solves this problem by allowing exclusive access of each student to his/her grades. Although the teacher sends a file to the server with the grades of all students in a course or group, a student can only see his/her grades.

For storage of grades, SWAD do not use a closed system with preset columns or fields format. Instead, the only restriction is that the teacher keep the student grades in a table in HTML format, which can be generated with any program that allows it, such as Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc. The table can have any number of header and footer rows (both numbers are automatically detected by SWAD and the teacher can then change them), and between these two parts the table must contain one row for each student with the only restriction that the first column is the ID/Passport number (several IDs are allowed in the same table cell). Moreover, the number of columns and their format is not relevant.

The option FILES > Marks presents on screen a list of files of marks. When a student clicks on one of these files, in a new window the heading rows, the row corresponding to the student and the footing rows of the table are shown. If the query is made by a teacher, the marks of a student of the course or group chosen randomly are presented. The teacher can give each student very comprehensive information, including scores on each of the criteria evaluated in each section of the course.

For a student to see his/her marks it is necessary that:

• Any of the student IDs match any of the IDs in the first column of the table (several IDs are allowed in the same table cell, only need to match one).
• The matching student ID must be confirmed (in green). Any teacher can confirm the unconfirmed IDs (in red) of any of their students by clicking on Confirm ID next to the ID.

Teachers can send multiple files with the scores of all students (eg. a file for test scores, one for the regular exam, one for a special exam, etc.). Files can be organized into folders (eg. a folder for each group, for each teacher, etc.).

The files must be HTML type (.htm or .html) and must contain a single table (<table...>...</table>) with the grades. Files can be generated, for example, from a spreadsheet. After sending a file, by default the numbers of header and footer rows detected automatically by SWAD are shown. The teacher can change these numbers at any time by clicking on them.

Using a detailed spreadsheet offers several advantages:

• The teacher has in a single document comprehensive information on the evaluation of each student.
• The sum of the scores of each section is performed by the spreadsheet itself, avoiding errors, and even allowing automatic assignment of the final grade by formulas. Obviously, a complex design requires a lot of initial work, but the result is reusable in subsequent courses.
• Finally, each student knows the result obtained in each section.