Student Gradebook Management System (C++)

A small, console-based gradebook management system that lets you maintain a class roster, record assessment scores, and generate both individual student reports and class-level summaries.

From an industry perspective, this project practices what real software teams care about early: input validation, consistent data representation, reporting, and maintaining state across user operations—all common in admin tools, internal dashboards, and CRUD-style systems.

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What the Program Does

The application stores up to 50 students, each with up to 8 assessments. Through a menu-driven interface, you can:

• Add a new student (ID, name, and assessment scores)
• Update a student’s score for a chosen assessment
• Generate an individual student report (total, min, max, average, letter grade, pass/fail)
• Generate a class summary (class average, highest/lowest average, pass rate)
• Show a performance ranking (sorted by average, highest → lowest)
• List all student records (ID, name, average, grade)
• Delete a student record (and shift the arrays to close the gap)

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Core Constraints (Design Choices)

These constants control program limits:

• MAX_STUDENT = 50 → maximum number of students in memory
• MAX_TESTS = 8 → maximum number of assessments per student
• ID_LEN = 11 → max characters for stored IDs (including null terminator)
• NAME_LEN = 32 → max characters for stored names (including null terminator)

Student ID rule

A student ID must start with ets or ETS.
The program normalizes IDs to lowercase for consistent lookups.

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How Data Is Stored (Why This Matters)

The program uses fixed-size arrays:

• char ids[MAX_STUDENT][ID_LEN]
• char names[MAX_STUDENT][NAME_LEN]
• double marks[MAX_STUDENT][MAX_TESTS]
• int studentCount

This is a classic “static table” approach: fast, predictable, and simple.
In real systems, you’d often replace this with std::vector, structs/classes, and persistent storage (files/DB). But for learning and for small tools, this is a solid way to practice correctness, boundaries, and indexing discipline.

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Menu Overview

When you run the program, it asks:

1. Number of assessments per student (1–8)

Then it loops over this menu:

• 1) Add a student record
• 2) Update a student's assessment score
• 3) Generate an individual student report
• 4) Generate class summary and performance ranking
• 5) Display all student records
• 6) Delete a student record
• 0) Exit

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Grading Logic

The program computes:

• Total = sum of assessment marks
• Average = total / number of assessments
• Min/Max marks across assessments
• Letter grade from the average:

Average	Grade
> 90	A+
≥ 85	A
≥ 80	A-
≥ 75	B+
≥ 70	B
≥ 65	B-
≥ 60	C+
≥ 50	C-
< 50	F

Pass/Fail: Pass if average ≥ 50.

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Input Validation (Reliability)

This project emphasizes robust console input handling:

• readNum() repeats until a valid number is entered
• readNumRange() enforces numeric bounds (e.g., 0–100)
• readName() and readId() enforce maximum length and required format
• clearBadInput() resets cin after bad input to prevent infinite failure loops

This is exactly the kind of defensive programming that prevents “works on my machine” bugs in production tools.

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How to Build and Run (Windows)

Option A: g++ (MinGW / MSYS2)

From the project folder:

g++ -std=c++17 -O2 -Wall -Wextra -pedantic main.cpp -o gradebook
.\gradebook.exe

If your file isn’t named main.cpp, replace it with your actual filename.

Option B: Visual Studio / MSVC

If using the Developer Command Prompt for VS:

cl /EHsc /std:c++17 main.cpp
main.exe

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Typical Usage Flow

1. Choose number of assessments (e.g., 4)
2. Add students (ID, name, scores)
3. List students to verify data
4. Generate student reports or class summary/ranking
5. Update marks if needed
6. Delete a student if they drop the course

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Known Limitations (Future Engineering Improvements)

If you continue this project (good portfolio upgrade), here are high-value steps:

• Replace parallel arrays with a struct Student { id, name, vector<double> marks; }
• Use std::vector<Student> instead of fixed-size arrays
• Persist data to a file (CSV/JSON) so the gradebook survives program exit
• Improve ID rules (length, allowed characters) and ensure uniqueness reliably

These are the same refactors you’d do in industry when a prototype becomes a maintained tool.

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License / Academic Note

This project is intended for educational use in learning C++ fundamentals and basic software engineering practices (validation, reporting, and stateful CRUD operations).