Assessing Programming Skills and Knowledge during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Experience Report

Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in disruption to the delivery of higher education. The government-mandated workplace closures that lasted for two months from April 2020 resulted in the closing of all university campuses in our city. This happened while our first-year introductory Python programming course was still in progress. We were thus unable to administer our final exam on campus. In this paper, we describe how our final exam, usually conducted on campus, was replaced with a performance-based assessment. This assessment tasked students to design and program their own game individually. After submitting their code, each student was then required to attend an oral exam that was administered online. We reflect on our experience, drawing from both instructors' and students' perspectives of the programming task and the assessment format. We conclude with a description of how the lessons learnt were applied to a subsequent run of the course.