Automatically assessed electronic exams in programming courses
Teemu Rajala, Erkki Kaila, Rolf Lindén, Einari Kurvinen, Erno Lokkila, Mikko‐Jussi Laakso, Tapio Salakoski · Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference · 2016
Educational technology is nowadays utilized frequently in programming courses. Still, the final exams are mostly done using "traditional" pen-and-paper approach. In this paper, we present the adaptation of automatically assessed electronic exams in two programming courses. The first course was an introductory programming course taught using Java and the second one an advanced course about object-oriented programming. The usage of electronic exams offers several potential benefits for students, including, for example, the possibility to compile, test and debug the program code. To study the adaptation of electronic exams, we observed two instances of the courses mentioned above. Individual scores, submission counts and time spent on each task were analyzed. This data enabled us to classify the exercises in exams according to their difficulty level. This information can be used to further design exams to measure students' knowledge and skills adequately. The analyzed data and the student feedback seem to confirm that electronic exams are an excellent tool for evaluating students in programming courses, and can be recommended to other educators as well.