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Semi-automatic assessment approach to programming code for novice students

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conference contribution
posted on 2016-03-04, 15:06 authored by Selim Buyrukoglu, Firat BatmazFirat Batmaz, Russell LockRussell Lock
Programming languages have been an integral element of the taught skills of many technical subjects in Higher Education for the last half century. Moreover, secondary school students have also recently started learning programming languages. This increase in the number of students learning programming languages makes the efficient and effective assessment of student work more important. This research focuses on one key approach to assessment using technology: the semi-automated marking of novice students’ program code. The open-ended, flexible nature of programming ensures that no two significant pieces of code are likely to be the same. However, it has been observed that there are a number of common code fragments within these dissimilar solutions. This observation forms the basis of our proposed approach. The initial research focuses on the ‘if’ structure to evaluate the theory behind the approach taken, which is appropriate given its commonality across programming languages. The paper also discusses the results of real world analysis of novice students’ programming code on ‘if’ structures. The paper concludes that the approach taken could form a more effective and efficient method for the assessment of student coding assignments.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Published in

CSEDU 2016

Citation

BUYRUKOGLU, S., BATMAZ, F. and LOCK, R., 2016. Semi-automatic assessment approach to programming code for novice students. IN: Uhomoibhi , J. et al. (eds.) Proceedings of CSEDU 2016, the International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pp. 289-297.

Publisher

CSEDU

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is a conference paper. It was presented at the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, Rome, Italy, 21-23 April 2016.

ISBN

978-989-758-179-3

Language

  • en

Location

Rome