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Automated Reporting of Code Quality Issues in Student Submissions

  • Conference paper
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Towards a Collaborative Society Through Creative Learning (WCCE 2022)

Part of the book series: IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology ((IFIPAICT,volume 685))

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Abstract

Despite its importance in industry, code quality is often overlooked in academia. A number of automated tools to report code quality have been developed but many of them are impractical to use. They either are developed as a standalone tool, require the use of a particular IDE, and/or need historical data. This paper presents code quality issues reporter (CQIS), a tool that can be embedded in an assessment submission system; it identifies code quality issues for each student submission via static analysis, and reports those in an HTML page whose link is sent via email. The tool covers 52 code quality issues specifically curated for academia, 32 for Java and 20 for Python. According to four quasi-experiments with a total of 274 students, students with CQIS are likely to have fewer code quality issues so long as the expected solutions are long and complex and code quality is considered as part of the marking. These students are also more aware of code quality, and readability in particular.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://checkstyle.sourceforge.io/.

  2. 2.

    https://flake8.pycqa.org/en/latest/.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/oscarkarnalim/CQS.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/google/code-prettify.

  5. 5.

    https://lucene.apache.org/.

  6. 6.

    https://github.com/dwyl/english-words.

  7. 7.

    https://www.curlewcommunications.uk/wordlist.html.

  8. 8.

    http://indodic.com/SpellCheckInstall.html.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia

    Oscar Karnalim & William Chivers

  2. Maranatha Christian University, Surya Sumantri Street No. 65, Bandung, West Java, 40164, Indonesia

    Oscar Karnalim & Billy Susanto Panca

  3. Callaghan, NSW, 2259, Australia

    Simon

Authors
  1. Oscar Karnalim
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  2. Simon
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  3. William Chivers
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  4. Billy Susanto Panca
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Oscar Karnalim .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, La Trobe University, Deepdene, VIC, Australia

    Therese Keane

  2. Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Cathy Lewin

  3. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Torsten Brinda

  4. Istituto Tecnologie Didattiche, Consiglio Nazioanale delle Ricerche, Genoa, Genova, Italy

    Rosa Bottino

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Karnalim, O., Simon, Chivers, W., Panca, B.S. (2023). Automated Reporting of Code Quality Issues in Student Submissions. In: Keane, T., Lewin, C., Brinda, T., Bottino, R. (eds) Towards a Collaborative Society Through Creative Learning. WCCE 2022. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 685. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43393-1_47

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43393-1_47

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-43392-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-43393-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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