Automated assessment tools: too many cooks, not enough collaboration
Raymond Pettit, James E. Prather · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2017
The demand for computer science education is rapidly growing. Given the rate of increase in enrollments, faculty can struggle to provide quality instruction and assessment to students. When faced with assessing a larger group of students, automated assessment tools (AATs) are often suggested as a resource. Researchers have been creating tools for decades, but often in isolation. These tools have been growing in popularity in introductory programming courses, but researchers may have a difficult time synthesizing valid data to draw conclusions about the tools' efficacy for increasing student learning. This paper briefly examines the range and usefulness of AATs and demonstrates the need for collaboration between the researchers creating them in order to produce higher quality tools that can demonstratively show an increase in student learning.