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Evaluating Mastery-oriented Grading in an Intensive CS1 Course

Published: 07 March 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Allowing students to re-attempt assessments has been shown to be effective in traditional university-level courses in improving student mastery of course content. In this paper, we analyse an intensive programming introductory experience, where first semester university students' full load is a single semester-long course that teaches the basics of programming and software engineering. We study its use of mastery-based grading: offering five (formative) low-stakes quizzes (with retakes), each focused on a single topic, and five (summative) higher-stakes exams that assess all learning objectives. Our research questions are: (i) ''Do second chances help students to increase their performance over time in intensive courses?''; and (ii) ''Are second chances effective in reducing stress/mental load/weight of assessments in intensive courses?''. We find that (i) offering second chances on quizzes decreases the number of students at risk of failing before the first exam; (ii) students' proficiency in coding tasks (as measured by exam grades) improve during the semester; and (iii) that our schedule reduces anxiety and mental load for students, but only after students take the first chance.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Experiences of early assessment to teach functional programmingJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682400018235Online publication date: 3-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Teaching CS1 with a Mastery Learning Framework: Changes in CS2 Results and Students' SatisfactionProceedings of the 2024 on ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference V. 110.1145/3649165.3690105(221-227)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE 2024: Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1
March 2024
1583 pages
ISBN:9798400704239
DOI:10.1145/3626252
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 07 March 2024

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Author Tags

  1. assessment
  2. computer-based exams
  3. computing education
  4. mastery
  5. second chance testing

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Experiences of early assessment to teach functional programmingJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682400018235Online publication date: 3-Feb-2025
  • (2024)Teaching CS1 with a Mastery Learning Framework: Changes in CS2 Results and Students' SatisfactionProceedings of the 2024 on ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference V. 110.1145/3649165.3690105(221-227)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2024

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