Instructor Performance on Progressively Complex Programming Tasks: A Multi-Institutional Study from India
Viraj Kumar, Amey Karkare · 2021
Most of the 2.5 million undergraduates in CS and related programs in India are enrolled in institutions outside the top tier. While official policies broadly acknowledge that many instructors at these institutions lack the requisite domain competence, there is no precise understanding of their limitations. In this study, we analyse the ability of CS instructors from 10 mid-tier institutions in Karnataka (India) to perform CS1-level programming tasks. While instructors can perform simple code tracing tasks with reasonable accuracy, we find a sharp fall in their ability to reason about code abstractly, to modify given code, and to write code. Our findings have immediate implications for faculty training initiatives, which must initially focus on these foundational skills.