Suitability of SCS1 as a Pre-CS2 Assessment Instrument
Yang Song, Yunkai Xiao, Jonathan Stephens, Emma Ruesch, Sean Roginski, Lucas Layman · 2020
In an entry-level programming course, the instructor needs to assess students' prior knowledge or to evaluate their learning at important milestones. The Second CS1 Assessment (SCS1) is one of the best-known validated tests of programming knowledge. It is a multiple-choice test written in pseudo-code, covering concepts commonly presented in Computer Science 1 (CS1) courses. However, SCS1 is known to be an unwieldy assessment - the questions tend to be difficult and thereby may not provide good discrimination between students with average competencies against the weak ones. In our project, we created a set of short deliberate-practice questions for CS1 topics and used them to evaluate students' prior knowledge at the beginning of a Computer Science 2 (CS2) course. This set of deliberate-practice questions consists of 127 multiple-choice questions.