gradesCorax

gradesCorax is an open-source software platform designed to process, validate, and analyze student grade data to support transparency, fairness, and reproducible reporting in educational settings. The project emphasizes auditable workflows and modular extensibility, enabling institutions to compare grading practices across courses and terms without exposing personally identifiable information.

gradesCorax originated from the Corax Initiative, a collaboration among educators and data scientists that began in 2021. The software is released under the MIT license and has an active community contributing features, documentation, and test suites. Since its initial release, multiple minor and major versions have expanded capabilities, with the 2.x series focusing on governance and scalability.

Key features include data import from CSV, Excel, and SQL sources; data cleaning and normalization using multiple schemes (z-score, min-max, percentile rank); support for different grading schemas, including numeric, letter grades, and composite indices; fairness and bias dashboards; audit trails and reproducibility; role-based access control; and a web-based UI, a REST API, and a command-line interface.

Technical architecture: gradesCorax is Python-based, leveraging Pandas for data manipulation and SQLAlchemy for data storage; it includes a plugin system for custom scoring rules and can operate in local, on-premises, or containerized deployments. It also supports anonymization and data masking to protect student privacy.

Usage and reception: adopted by several universities and school districts for pilot evaluations of grading practices and program assessment. Proponents cite improved transparency and auditability; critics highlight the need for robust data governance and potential complexity in setup.

See also: educational data mining, learning analytics, grade inflation, data governance.