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Homework 2 if statements and while loops
0. Overview:
In this assignment, you will develop a program to handle university degree auditing and course
management. That is, after taking a set of courses, a student would like to know if she/he has met
the graduation requirements for a particular degree (or what the student is missing to meet those
requirements). The requirements include required courses, total credit hours, minimum GPA, etc.
As a college student, can you see the value of such a tool in the real world?
To build any software system, one must be equipped with the following: a firm grasp of the
problem to be solved, the ability of dividing the problem into smaller problems, devising related
algorithms to solve the smaller problems and combining their solutions, the ability to translate
the high level design into a computer program in a particular programming language (in our case
C++), and the ability to debug and test the program.
All of our projects in this course are related to this core problem. So before you begin, you may
want to review your own degree requirements to make sure you really understand them. If we are
not able to understand a problem, then no matter how good we are as programmers or software
engineers, we will not be able to solve that problem.
Achieving the minimum required GPA is one of our fundamental requirements. Our first project
was to compute the GPA for five courses. In this project, we will extend our first project so
we can compute the GPA for an arbitrary number of courses requested by the user.
1. Problem Statement:
The primary goal of this programming assignment is to give students experience with if
statements and while loops. A secondary goal is to give students a chance to modify and extend
an existing program. A third goal is to practice getting string values containing spaces from the
user so we may handle course names such as “Programming Foundations I”. To meet these
goals, students will be required to improve their previous GPA program to make the program
more flexible and more robust.
Improve flexibility: Your previous program had a hard coded limit of 5 classes that would be
used to calculate the GPA. This is very limiting because not all students take 5 classes in a
semester, and there is no way to calculate the GPA for a full year, or for the whole degree. To
make your program more flexible, you should first ask the user to enter the number of classes
they would like to process, and then use a loop in the program to read and process the class
grades and credit hours to calculate the GPA.
Improve robustness: In the previous program, you had the option to read grades as the
characters A, B, C, D or F. Now, we will add W and I as possible grades (courses with W or I
grades will not be used in the GPA calculation). Furthermore, you were not required to any errorchecking to make sure the user actually followed directions in the first assignment. In this
assignment, you should make sure that the user only enters grades using the A, B, C, D, F, I or W
characters. To make your program more robust, you need to add code to check the user's input to
see if it is valid and loop until the grade information is input correctly. A similar check should be
added to the number of credit hours to make sure these values are sensible.
Enhancement: In addition to the grade and credit hours of a course, we will ask the user to enter
the course name (such as “Programming Foundations I”) and course number (such as “CSCE
2004”) for each course. At the moment, we simply read the above information and gather what
we need for GPA computation. In our next project, we will store them in our program so we may
list all the courses the user input.
Students are allowed to use any combination of if statements and while loops they need to
complete this assignment. You are not required or allowed to look ahead to more advanced C++
features like arrays or user defined functions to perform this task.
2. Design:
For this assignment, you have three big design decisions. First, you must decide what order you
want the user to enter input data. Second, you must figure out if the user actually followed
directions, and what to do to force the user to enter valid data. Finally, you must implement the
GPA calculation with a variable number of class grades. To simply the user interface design task
for you and to have a uniform look and feel across students, your program will need to use the
same “user interface” as the given executable file. In other words, when your program is
executed, it should behave just like the given executable file, except for possible rewording of
the instructions to the user. Make sure you write comments in your code to explain your design
decisions.
The following further clarifies the user interface to be implemented. Even though many designs
are reasonable for the first decision above, we will have a uniform design for this project. This
allows us to test our program using input redirection and for later file processing. The user will
enter the following information one line at a time: 1) number of courses, 2) course name (for
example, Programming Foundations I), 3) course number (for example, CSCE 2004), 4) course
grade (for example A), 5) course credit hours (for example 4), and repeat 2) to 5 for the rest of
the courses. The following is an example of what the user types (program output is not shown):
2
A4
Calculus 1
math2554
B43. Implementation:
Since you are starting with your previous program, you should already have something that
compiles and runs. Since you must add several features to this program, it is important to make
these changes incrementally one feature at a time, writing comments, adding code, compiling,
and debugging. This way, you always have a program that "does something" even if it is not
complete. Also, you should make a copy of your original code, so you can compare the programs
later on.
Perhaps you may first add validation code for five courses. After that, you can develop the logic
and code for accumulating numerator and denominator of GPA calculation in a loop so we may
handle any number of courses. Finally, add the code to read in the course name and course
number. (This is merely a suggestion, however.)
4. Testing:
Test your program to check that it operates correctly for all of the requirements listed above. You
may use the given executable file to help you. Also check for the error handling capabilities of
the code. Try your program with several input values, and save your testing output in text files
for inclusion in your project report.
5. Documentation:
When you have completed your C++ program, write a short report (less than one page long)
describing what the objectives were, what you did, and the status of the program. Does it work
properly for all test cases? Are there any known problems?
In this assignment, you will develop a program to handle university degree auditing and course
management. That is, after taking a set of courses, a student would like to know if she/he has met
the graduation requirements for a particular degree (or what the student is missing to meet those
requirements). The requirements include required courses, total credit hours, minimum GPA, etc.
As a college student, can you see the value of such a tool in the real world?
To build any software system, one must be equipped with the following: a firm grasp of the
problem to be solved, the ability of dividing the problem into smaller problems, devising related
algorithms to solve the smaller problems and combining their solutions, the ability to translate
the high level design into a computer program in a particular programming language (in our case
C++), and the ability to debug and test the program.
All of our projects in this course are related to this core problem. So before you begin, you may
want to review your own degree requirements to make sure you really understand them. If we are
not able to understand a problem, then no matter how good we are as programmers or software
engineers, we will not be able to solve that problem.
Achieving the minimum required GPA is one of our fundamental requirements. Our first project
was to compute the GPA for five courses. In this project, we will extend our first project so
we can compute the GPA for an arbitrary number of courses requested by the user.
1. Problem Statement:
The primary goal of this programming assignment is to give students experience with if
statements and while loops. A secondary goal is to give students a chance to modify and extend
an existing program. A third goal is to practice getting string values containing spaces from the
user so we may handle course names such as “Programming Foundations I”. To meet these
goals, students will be required to improve their previous GPA program to make the program
more flexible and more robust.
Improve flexibility: Your previous program had a hard coded limit of 5 classes that would be
used to calculate the GPA. This is very limiting because not all students take 5 classes in a
semester, and there is no way to calculate the GPA for a full year, or for the whole degree. To
make your program more flexible, you should first ask the user to enter the number of classes
they would like to process, and then use a loop in the program to read and process the class
grades and credit hours to calculate the GPA.
Improve robustness: In the previous program, you had the option to read grades as the
characters A, B, C, D or F. Now, we will add W and I as possible grades (courses with W or I
grades will not be used in the GPA calculation). Furthermore, you were not required to any errorchecking to make sure the user actually followed directions in the first assignment. In this
assignment, you should make sure that the user only enters grades using the A, B, C, D, F, I or W
characters. To make your program more robust, you need to add code to check the user's input to
see if it is valid and loop until the grade information is input correctly. A similar check should be
added to the number of credit hours to make sure these values are sensible.
Enhancement: In addition to the grade and credit hours of a course, we will ask the user to enter
the course name (such as “Programming Foundations I”) and course number (such as “CSCE
2004”) for each course. At the moment, we simply read the above information and gather what
we need for GPA computation. In our next project, we will store them in our program so we may
list all the courses the user input.
Students are allowed to use any combination of if statements and while loops they need to
complete this assignment. You are not required or allowed to look ahead to more advanced C++
features like arrays or user defined functions to perform this task.
2. Design:
For this assignment, you have three big design decisions. First, you must decide what order you
want the user to enter input data. Second, you must figure out if the user actually followed
directions, and what to do to force the user to enter valid data. Finally, you must implement the
GPA calculation with a variable number of class grades. To simply the user interface design task
for you and to have a uniform look and feel across students, your program will need to use the
same “user interface” as the given executable file. In other words, when your program is
executed, it should behave just like the given executable file, except for possible rewording of
the instructions to the user. Make sure you write comments in your code to explain your design
decisions.
The following further clarifies the user interface to be implemented. Even though many designs
are reasonable for the first decision above, we will have a uniform design for this project. This
allows us to test our program using input redirection and for later file processing. The user will
enter the following information one line at a time: 1) number of courses, 2) course name (for
example, Programming Foundations I), 3) course number (for example, CSCE 2004), 4) course
grade (for example A), 5) course credit hours (for example 4), and repeat 2) to 5 for the rest of
the courses. The following is an example of what the user types (program output is not shown):
2
A4
Calculus 1
math2554
B43. Implementation:
Since you are starting with your previous program, you should already have something that
compiles and runs. Since you must add several features to this program, it is important to make
these changes incrementally one feature at a time, writing comments, adding code, compiling,
and debugging. This way, you always have a program that "does something" even if it is not
complete. Also, you should make a copy of your original code, so you can compare the programs
later on.
Perhaps you may first add validation code for five courses. After that, you can develop the logic
and code for accumulating numerator and denominator of GPA calculation in a loop so we may
handle any number of courses. Finally, add the code to read in the course name and course
number. (This is merely a suggestion, however.)
4. Testing:
Test your program to check that it operates correctly for all of the requirements listed above. You
may use the given executable file to help you. Also check for the error handling capabilities of
the code. Try your program with several input values, and save your testing output in text files
for inclusion in your project report.
5. Documentation:
When you have completed your C++ program, write a short report (less than one page long)
describing what the objectives were, what you did, and the status of the program. Does it work
properly for all test cases? Are there any known problems?
1 file (47.1KB)
