Gradiance Student Guide

Gradiance On-Line Accelerated Learning (GOAL) is a system for creating and automatically grading homeworks, programming laboratories, and tests. Through the concept of "root questions," Gradiance encourages students to solve complete problems, even though the homework appears to be in a multiple-choice format. This guide explains how students can make best use of the GOAL system and steps you through the critical operations.

Creating Your Gradiance Account

To use the Gradiance system, you will need an account. How you get the account depends on what arrangements your instructor has made. For the Winter of 2006, there are two sites providing service:

  1. for services sold by Addison-Wesley or Prentice-Hall. For these services, first to go to the site provided by the publisher. The current sites are:

    At the appropriate one of these sites, you will create your account. After creating the account and purchasing the desired service, you should go to and enter your class. Note that your login/password at this Gradiance site is the one you created at the Prentice-Hall or Addison-Wesley site.

  2. for all other course materials sold by, or provided gratis, by Gradiance. On this site, you create your account, and pay for it if necessary. You will be asked to provide:

Joining a Class

The first thing you will need to do after establishing your account (as in Creating Your Account above) is to go to the proper Gradiance site, either or, and log in. You will see your home page, where you can enter your Class Token, an eight hex-digit code, that your instructor will generate and tell you. It's purpose, in addition to identifying the class uniquely among all classes at all institutions, is to make sure that only people the instructor expects to be in the class are in fact able to access class assignments.

Your Gradiance Home Page

When you log in, you get a screen with a left menu that covers basic account-management functions, and a body that allows you to access your class or classes. In the left menu you will see options:

At the top of the page body, you will see a "class portfolio." You should find listed there all classes you are taking and that use Gradiance. Clicking on one of them will send you to the home page for that class. From there, you can work your assignments, as described in the next section.

Doing Your Class Work

When you enter a class, the left menu changes. The new options are:


Homeworks appear to be sets of multiple-choice questions. Normally, they will be "root questions," which means that each time someone opens the assignment, they get the same question, but a different choice from among one correct and three incorrect answers. Normally, both the questions and the choices appear in random order.

While different instructors may employ different policies, normally you will be allowed to open the same assignment as many times as you like, and you may submit it as many times as you like. Your goal is to get a perfect score, eventually. That is, the purpose of Gradiance assignments is not to test you, but to help you learn the material. It doesn't matter if you don't get it right at first; you'll be given help (discussed below).

Hints for Doing Gradiance Homeworks

Most, if not all, questions you will be given have "choice explanations" for the incorrect choices. Your instructor will probably allow you to see these immediately after submitting a homework. While the nature of the choice explanation varies from question to question, it usually either explains why your answer is wrong or gives you an outline of the problem's solution. Some students like to answer wrong the first time purposely, to get the hints, and then reopen the assignment and start working "for real." However, to prevent rapid-fire guessing, your instructor may require a minimum interval between openings of one assignment, e.g., 10 minutes.

We suggest that you think of each Gradiance question as if you were asked to work an ordinary, "long-answer" question. Work that question and keep the answer handy on a piece of paper. The multiple-choice question will typically sample your knowledge of the correct answer. For example, if the question calls for you to identify one tuple in the join of two relations, you should compute the whole join and leave it in front of you. You'll then find it easy to identify the one tuple out of four choices that is in the join.

If you have worked the problem correctly, you'll find the proper choice on the paper. If you have worked the problem incorrectly, you'll probably make a wrong choice and will get a choice explanation that may help for the next time you try the assignment. Note that if you make no choice, you will not be given a choice explanation, so always try something.

After the due date for your assignment, you will be allowed to view your final submission. Typically (instructor's option), with each question will appear a solution to the problem as a whole, along with the choice explanation for any wrong choices.


Lab Projects are different from homeworks. You are asked to write small programs, such as SQL queries. As with homeworks, you are allowed to submit labs as many times as you like. Each time you submit you get a response for each of the queries that you tried to answer. There are three possibilities:

  1. Correct. You hope for this response; it means you got the query right.
  2. Syntax Error(s). There were some syntax errors in what you wrote. The message from the compiler is passed along to you.
  3. Algorithmic Errors. The query was syntactically correct but gave the wrong answer. You will be offered a chance to see an example of what went wrong. That is, you can see, on a sample input, what your code produced and what correct code would have produced on the same input. Often, studying the difference suggests what you are doing wrong.

Hints for Doing Gradiance Laboratories

Since these labs normally involve writing a number of independent pieces of code, e.g., SQL queries, we suggest that you work on one part at a time. Submit it and see if you got it right. Remember that you will be given either a syntax error message or an example of how your code goes astray, if the program is wrong. We remember that you got a part correct, but we don't remember the exact code you wrote.

Homeworks and labs behave differently when you try to resubmit. With labs, we know it is important for you to retain your work, edit your queries, and try again. Thus, hitting the "back" button once or twice gets you to your most recent submission, and this page can be submitted as many times as you like. Homeworks, on the other hand, are designed to sample your knowledge of the solution to an underlying problem. You may submit each version of a homework only once. If you try changing guesses on a page you have submitted and then resubmitting it, you get an error message, and this work will not be accepted. You need to reopen the same assignment again, get different answer choices, and pick from among the new choices.