The Effect of Reporting Known Issues on Students' Work
Iris Gaber, Amir Kirsh · 2018
Students in Computer Science programming courses often have difficulty with coding, which results in flawed exercises. We asked students working on programming exercises to report known defects in their submission. We distinguish between three types of defects: bugs in the program, missing features, and poorly written code. Results show that students detect and report missing features and bugs quite accurately (59% of the bugs and 61% of the missing features were reported), but they are much less aware of the quality of their code (only 28% of the code issues were reported). After comparing their grades to the grades of the previous year we argue that the request to report defects helps student in submitting exercises with fewer bugs. Finally, the students affirmed that the request to report defects helped them in detecting problems and improved their time management.