A Framework for Declarative Autograders
David Hovemeyer · 2022
Autograders - programs which run automated tests on student code submissions in order to judge functional correctness - are a useful way to provide immediate feedback to students on the quality of their work, and to reduce the manual effort required to assign grades. Platforms such as Gradescope (www.gradescope.com) are increasingly a critical type of infrastructure for CS courses, especially as enrollments grow. The Declarative Autograder Framework (DAF) is an open source Ruby library intended to make autograders relatively easy to implement, by cleanly separating the concerns of what is tested from how that testing is carried out. It has been used successfully in several courses to autograde tens of thousands of code submissions for more than one thousand students.