Assessment Automation of Complex Student Programming Assignments

Author:

Novak Matija1ORCID,Kermek Dragutin1

Affiliation:

1. Faculty of Organization and Informatics, University of Zagreb, Pavlinska 2, 42000 Varaždin, Croatia

Abstract

Grading student programming assignments is not an easy task. This task is even more challenging when talking about complex programming assignments at university graduate level. By complex assignments, we mean assignments where students have to program a complete application from scratch. For example, building a complete web application with a client and server side, whereby the application uses multiple threads that gather data from some external service (like the REST service, IoT sensors, etc.), processes these data and store them in some storage (e.g., a database), implements a custom protocol over a socket or something similar, implements their own REST/SOAP/GraphQL service, then sends or receives JMS/MQTT/WebSocket messages, etc. Such assignments give students an inside view of building real Internet applications. On the other hand, assignments like these take a long time to be tested and graded manually, e.g., up to 1 h per student. To speed up the assessment process, there are different automation possibilities that can check for the correctness of some application parts without endangering the grading quality. In this study, different possibilities of automation are described that have been improved over several years. This process takes advantage of unit testing, bash scripting, and other methods. The main goal of this study is to define an assessment process that can be used to grade complex programming assignments, with concrete examples of what and how to automate. This process involves assignment preparation for automation, plagiarism (i.e., better said similarity) detection, performing an automatic check of the correctness of each programming assignment, conducting an analysis of the obtained data, the awarding of points (grading) for each programming assignment, and other such activities. We also discuss what the downsides of automation are and why it is not possible to completely automate the grading process.

Publisher

MDPI AG

同舟云学术

1.学者识别学者识别

2.学术分析学术分析

3.人才评估人才评估

"同舟云学术"是以全球学者为主线,采集、加工和组织学术论文而形成的新型学术文献查询和分析系统,可以对全球学者进行文献检索和人才价值评估。用户可以通过关注某些学科领域的顶尖人物而持续追踪该领域的学科进展和研究前沿。经过近期的数据扩容,当前同舟云学术共收录了国内外主流学术期刊6万余种,收集的期刊论文及会议论文总量共计约1.5亿篇,并以每天添加12000余篇中外论文的速度递增。我们也可以为用户提供个性化、定制化的学者数据。欢迎来电咨询!咨询电话:010-8811{复制后删除}0370

www.globalauthorid.com

TOP

Copyright © 2019-2024 北京同舟云网络信息技术有限公司
京公网安备11010802033243号  京ICP备18003416号-3