Asking Students to Refactor their Code: A Simple and Valuable Exercise

Cruz Izu, Claudio Mirolo · 2024

Whilst most undergraduate students eventually produce functionally correct code, they often disregard their code style and overall quality when it is not graded. As reported by the literature, quality defects affect both code structure and code style, and these issues seem to persist even in later years. This paper reports on the potential of a low-cost intervention that directed CS2 students to revise and refactor their code, with a specific focus on code structure, by resorting to a range of online refactoring resources.

Read the paper · More papers on PaperTik