Evaluating students' programs using automated assessment
John English, Tammy Rosenthal · 2009
This poster presents our experience of using automated assessment in a programming course given by the Department of Computer Science at Holon Institute of Technology (HIT). The course was given as a first year course as part of an engineering degree which introduces students to programming in C and which teaches them the basics of the imperative programming paradigm. About 200 students took the course in Autumn 2009. They were required to submit 3 programming assignments each of which contained 4 programming tasks. Most of the assignments were evaluated manually. Our poster presents our experience with 15 students who used an automated assessment system to submit one of their assignments. The system used was Checkpoint [1], an integrated automated assessment system developed by the first author, which generates automated feedback and evaluation for students' work. The system manages both homework assignments and formal examinations based on a range of different question types, including questions requiring free-text answers. It also allows automatically-generated marks to be manually moderated and adjusted, with feedback comments from the human moderator. Checkpoint has been in use since October 2005 at the University of Brighton in the UK for assessing two first year Java programming modules which comprise a total of about 150 students annually.