C-programming self-assessment exercises versus final exams: 12 years of experience

Abstract

The new curricula derived from the Bologna process encourage continuous evaluations during the teaching period. This situation causes already depleted teachers to have an additional workload during the course, so the emergence of tools that automatically evaluate this work is necessary. In computer science, the ideal evaluation technique would be to use automatic code evaluators (such as C, Java, C++, etc.). The main objective of this work is to analyze whether the use of C-coding self-assessment exercises correlates with an improvement in exam performance. For this purpose, the implementation of self-assessment exercises on the AulaWeb platform during the last 12 academic years (2010/2011–2021/2022) in a Programming Fundamentals course (Fundamentos de Programación) in an engineering faculty at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) was collected. The main tasks carried out in this research have been: (i) recovery and analysis of the information collected from the AulaWeb platform and (ii) the study of the influence of the self-assessment exercises on the final grades obtained by the students of the course through correlations. The most important findings are: (a) self-assessment exercises generate experience and confidence when facing problems (this situation translates into a higher probability of passing the course) and (b) self-assessment exercises influence the final exams taken at the end of the semester, mainly due to the short time between the end of classes and the exam. Self-assessment exercises provide valuable information for teachers to monitor the progress of large groups of students during the semester and for students to pass exams.