Current practices of programming assessment at higher learning institutions

Abstract

Assessing students' programming exercises has become a difficult activity that most educators encounter nowadays. The activity basically includes the tasks to construct questions and solution models in programming exercises as well as the method to evaluate students' solutions. Existing studies particularly in the area of programming assessment still have limited discussions on current practices in conducting the activity. This paper reports the preliminary study conducted among educators who have been teaching programming courses at higher learning institutions within the northern region in Malaysia. The study aims to gauge the current practices in the construction and evaluation of programming exercises item among educators at the associated institutions. The study used a questionnaire to gather the relevant data from the selected subjects. The results reveal that both the negative and positive testing criteria are essential in constructing and evaluating programming exercises. The findings of this study will be the input to identify the adequate criteria that should be included in developing a schema of test set for automatic programming assessment. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.