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An Exploratory Study on Instructors’ Agreement on the Correctness of Computer Program Outputs

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Hybrid Learning and Continuing Education (ICHL 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8038))

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Abstract

Many universities have developed Automated Program Assessment Systems to automate the tasks of assessing students’ computer programs so as to enhance students’ learning and relieve instructors’ workload. These systems typically evaluate the correctness of a program by comparing its actual outputs with the instructor’s pre-defined expected outputs. However, an actual output may still be correct even if it deviates from the expected output. One challenge in building such a system is to devise an automated mechanism for determining program output correctness that matches the instructor’s own judgment. This is difficult if instructors have different individual judgments. This paper reports an exploratory empirical study which evaluates instructors’ agreement on the correctness of students’ program outputs. Our study demonstrates reasonably good overall agreement between the instructors and reveals the categories of program output variants for which they are more likely to agree or disagree.

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Tang, C.M., Yu, Y.T. (2013). An Exploratory Study on Instructors’ Agreement on the Correctness of Computer Program Outputs. In: Cheung, S.K.S., Fong, J., Fong, W., Wang, F.L., Kwok, L.F. (eds) Hybrid Learning and Continuing Education. ICHL 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8038. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39750-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39750-9_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39749-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39750-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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