Quickly Producing "Isomorphic" Exercises: Quantifying the Impact of Programming Question Permutations
Max Fowler, David Horton Smith, Craig B. Zilles · 2024
Small, auto-gradable programming exercises provide a useful tool with which to assess students' programming skills in introductory computer science. To reduce the time needed to produce programming exercises of similar difficulty, previous research has applied a permutation strategy to existing questions. Prior work has left several open questions: is prior exposure to a question typically indicative of higher student performance? Are observed changes in difficulty due to the specific surface feature permutations applied? How is student performance impacted by the first version of a question to which they may be exposed?