Exercise 3-5

Write a program that will keep track of grades for several students at once. The program could keep two vectors in sync. The first should hold the student’s names, and the second the final grades that can be computed as input is read. For now, you should assume a fixed number of homework grades. We’ll see in §4.1.3/56 how to handle a variable number of grades intermixed with student names.

Solution

This exercise is a good one. The nature of the problem and the eventual solution builds on all the fundamentals that we have learnt from this chapter. There are many ways to solve this. Here is one of these many ways.

The solution strategy:

• Create a constant numHomework that defines the fix number of homework scores required for each student.
• Have an infinite while loop to enable user to enter the studentName – there will be points where the user can exit the program peacefully by entering the end-of-file key (Ctrl-Z / F6 for windows).
• As soon as a studentName is read, we append it to the studentNames vector – this vector store the studentName elements.
• Within the while loop we have a for loop to enable user to enter the homeworkScore one by one- until the predefined constant numHomework is reached.
• During the process we compute the totalScore and subsequently the meanScore for the corresponding student.
• As soon as the meanScore is computed, we append it to the meanScores vector – this vector store the list of meanScore elements.
• The nature of the looping systems ensure the two vectors studentNames and meanScores are always in sync.
• Allow user to either continue (by entering another studentName), or exit (by entering the end-of-file key. i.e. Ctrl-Z or F6 for windows).
• Output the pairs of studentName and meanScore elements of the vectors studentNames and meanScores using a for loop.

Putting this all together, we have our full program.

#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
#include <algorithm>
#include <ios>
#include <string>
#include <vector>

using std::cin;             // <iostream>
using std::cout;            // <iostream>
using std::endl;            // <iostream>
using std::setprecision;    // <iomanip>
using std::sort;            // <algorithm>
using std::streamsize;      // <ios>
using std::string;          // <string>
using std::vector;          // <string>


int main()
{
    typedef vector<double>::size_type vecSize;

    const vecSize numHomework = 5;     // max number of homework per student

    string studentName;
    vector<string> studentNames;

    double homeworkScore;
    double totalScore;
    double meanScore;
    vector<double> meanScores;

    cout << "Enter student name: ";
    while (cin >> studentName)
    {
        studentNames.push_back(studentName);
        cout << "Enter " << numHomework << " homework scores below..." << endl;

        totalScore = 0; // Initialise
        meanScore = 0;  // Initialise

        for (vecSize i = 0; i != numHomework ; ++i)
        {
            cin >> homeworkScore;
            totalScore += homeworkScore;
        }

        meanScore = totalScore / numHomework;
        meanScores.push_back(meanScore);

        cout << "Enter another student name "
                "(or enter F6 key to exit): ";
    }

    vecSize numStudents = studentNames.size();
    cout << endl;
    cout << "Number of students entered: " << numStudents << endl;

    streamsize prec = cout.precision();
    for (vecSize i = 0; i != numStudents ; ++i)
    {
        cout << endl;
        cout << "Student: " << studentNames[i] << endl;
        cout << "Mean Score: " << setprecision(5)
            << meanScores[i] << setprecision(prec) << endl;
    }

    return 0;

}

Result

I now run a test to demonstrate the program output.

Enter student name: Johnny
Enter 5 homework scores below...
40
50
60
70
80
Enter another student name (or enter F6 key to exit): Fred
Enter 5 homework scores below...
99
78
67.5
66.8
100
Enter another student name (or enter F6 key to exit): Joe
Enter 5 homework scores below...
0
0
10
2
0
Enter another student name (or enter F6 key to exit): ^Z

Number of students entered: 3

Student: Johnny
Mean Score: 60

Student: Fred
Mean Score: 82.26

Student: Joe
Mean Score: 2.4

Process returned 0 (0x0)   execution time : 55.152 s

Reference