A technical perspective on ASAP – Automated System for Assessment of Programming

To learn computer programming, students are invariably asked to complete some form of assignment, which is often assessed by the instructors. This assessment can be time consuming, and an automatic system of assessment can reduce this burden and allow additional functionality. One practical issue is how to integrate them with the other components of the learning management system used by any given institution. ASAP is an automated programming assessment tool which conforms to the JISC e-learning framework, designed for to make such components interoperable and reusable. This paper reviews the previous work on automatic programming assessment, and then presents a technical review of ASAP, discussing its architecture and standards. The paper then discusses some of the challenges that have been faced in developing tests and running foreign code submitted to a web service. Possible extensions to the system are presented, and the current work is described.