Two UI bugs showed up this week as users began creating assignments for the semester. First, if instructors failed to publish their assignments, either for Eclipse or BlueJ submissions, they would get an exception when trying to save their newly created assignment. Second, the assignment editing page would not allow you to create a new set of submission rules unless you already had a set selected, which made creating the very first set very hard. Both of these problems are now fixed.

Together with several other interested individuals, I am organizing a birds-of-a-feather discussion on automated grading systems at SIGCSE'06 this March.

I've just completed work on a great idea for a Web-CAT feature suggested by Tony Allowatt last semester. Tony wrote the electronic submission plug-in for Eclipse, and suggested that Web-CAT could dynamically generate a set of submission target definitions for use by instructors. Web-CAT now does this for both the Eclipse plug-in, and for BlueJ's submitter extension.