Background: Automatically graded programming assignments provide instant feedback to students and significantly reduce manual grading time for instructors. However, creating comprehensive suites of test cases for programming problems within automatic graders can be time-consuming and complex. The effort needed to define test suites may deter some…

Past research has shown that student problem-solving skills may be used to determine student final exam performance. This study reports on the relationship between student perceived problem-solving skills and academic performance in introductory programming, in formative and summative programming assessment tasks. We found that the more effective…

Many students need assistance in debugging to achieve progress when they learn to write computer programs. Face-to-face interactions with individual students to give feedback on their programs, although definitely effective in facilitating their learning, are becoming difficult to achieve with ever-growing class sizes. This paper proposes a novel…

Discusses the importance of standards in introductory programming courses that enable novice software developers to write correct programs to specification and time. Considers issues involved with assessing students' programming abilities. Provides an overview of an automated assessment system adopted at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom)…