Semi Automated Partial Credit Grading of Programming Assignments

The grading of student programs is a time consuming process. As class sizes continue to grow, especially in entry level courses, manually grading student programs has become an even more daunting challenge. Increasing the difficulty of grading is the needs of graphical and interactive programs such as those used as part of the UNH Computer Science curriculum (and various textbooks). There are existing tools that support the grading of introductory programming assignments (TAME and Web-CAT). There are also frameworks that can be used to test student code (JUnit, Tester, and TestNG). While these programs and frameworks are helpful, they have little or no no support for programs that use real data structures or that have interactive or graphical features. In addition, the automated tests in all these tools provide only “all or nothing” evaluation. This is a significant limitation in many circumstances. Moreover, there is little or no support for dynamic alteration of grading criteria, which means that refactoring of test classes after deployment is not easily done. Our goal is to create a framework that can address these weaknesses. This framework needs to: 1. Support assignments that have interactive and graphical components. 2. Handle data structures in student programs such as lists, stacks, trees, and hash tables. 3. Be able to assign partial credit automatically when the instructor can predict errors in advance. 4. Provide additional answer clustering information to help graders identify and assign consistent partial credit for incorrect output that was not predefined. Most importantly, these tools, collectively called RPM (short for Rapid Program Management), should interface effectively with our current grading support framework without requiring large amounts of rewriting or refactoring of test code

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

Improving an Online Course for SQL Learners in LAB University of Applied Sciences: Making use of MOOC for efficient course

The main purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to improve the available SQL online course which is used in LAB University of Applied Sciences to an efficient one and to keep track of the making process, from researching to implementing. Thus, the thesis consists of two main parts which are theoretical (including knowledge and research from available sources) and empirical (noting the process of course improvement with real problems, solutions as well as explanation) part. Implementing an efficient studying course requires concrete knowledge on the course content (SQL), awareness of users’ learning method adoption (MOOC specifically) as well as how to implement the best possible course by using available utilities of the teaching/ learning method. As a result, theoretical is formed as a foundation for the mentioned knowledge. As the main target of the thesis is to generate an efficient SQL online course, empirical part is a must. In this part, the creation will be described step by step through the suggestion, implementation, and improvement along with interview and survey during the process. Assignment creation using VPL will be explained and concentrated in the course implementation. The study could be continued by improving the course by using the feedback from students after the deployment of the course

ItsSQL: Intelligent Tutoring System for SQL

SQL is a central component of any database course. Despite the small number of SQL commands, students struggle to practice the concepts. To overcome this challenge, we developed an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) to guide the learning process with a small effort by the lecturer. Other systems often give only basic feedback (correct or incorrect) or require hundreds of instance specific rules defined by a lecturer. In contrast, our system can provide individual feedback based on a semi-automatically/intelligent growing pool of reference solutions, i.e., sensible approaches. Moreover, we introduced the concept of good and bad reference solutions. The system was developed and evaluated in three steps based on Design Science research guidelines. The results of the study demonstrate that providing multiple reference solutions are useful with the support of harmonization to provide individual and real-time feedback and thus improve the learning process for students

Teaching Data Science

We describe an introductory data science course, entitled Introduction to Data Science, offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The course introduced general programming concepts by using the Python programming language with an emphasis on data preparation, processing, and presentation. The course had no prerequisites, and students were not expected to have any programming experience. This introductory course was designed to cover a wide range of topics, from the nature of data, to storage, to visualization, to probability and statistical analysis, to cloud and high performance computing, without becoming overly focused on any one subject. We conclude this article with a discussion of lessons learned and our plans to develop new data science courses.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2016

Semi-automatic assessment of basic SQL statements

Learning and assessing the Structured Query Language (SQL) is an important step in developing students' database skills. However, due to the increasing numbers of students learning SQL, assessing and providing detailed feedback to students' work can be time consuming and prone to errors. The main purpose of this research is to reduce or remove as many of the repetitive tasks in any phase of the assessment process of SQL statements as possible to achieve the consistency of marking and feedback on SQL answers.This research examines existing SQL assessment tools and their limitations by testing them on SQL questions, where the results reveal that students must attaint essential skills to be able to formulate basic SQL queries. This is because formulating SQL statements requires practice and effort by students. In addition, the standard steps adopted in many SQL assessment tools were found to be insufficient in successfully assessing our sample of exam scripts. The analysis of the outcomes identified several ways of solving the same query and the categories of errors based on the common student mistakes in SQL statements. Based on this, this research proposes a semi-automated assessment approach as a solution to improve students’ SQL formulation process, ensure the consistency of SQL grading and the feedback generated during the marking process. The semi-automatic marking method utilities both the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) system and Rule-Based Reasoning (RBR) system methodologies. The approach aims to reduce the workload of marking tasks by reducing or removing as many of the repetitive tasks in any phase of the marking process of SQL statements as possible. It also targets the improvement of feedback dimensions that can be given to students.In addition, the research implemented a prototype of the SQL assessment framework which supports the process of the semi-automated assessment approach. The prototype aims to enhance the SQL formulation process for students and minimise the required human effort for assessing and evaluating SQL statements. Furthermore, it aims to provide timely, individual and detailed feedback to the students. The new prototype tool allows students to formulate SQL statements using the point-and-click approach by using the SQL Formulation Editor (SQL-FE). It also aims to minimise the required human effort for assessing and evaluating SQL statements through the use of the SQL Marking Editor (SQL-ME). To ensure the effectiveness of the SQL-FE tool, the research conducted two studies which compared the newly implemented tool with the paper-based manual method in the first study (pilot study), and with the SQL Management Studio tool in the second study (full experiment). The results provided reasonable evidence that using SQL-FE can have a beneficial effect on formulating SQL statements and improve students’ SQL learning. The results also showed that students were able to solve and formulate the SQL query on time and their performance showed significant improvement. The research also carried out an experiment to examine the viability of the SQL Marking Editor by testing the SQL partial marking, grouping of identical SQL statements, and the resulting marking process after applying the generic marking rules. The experimental results presented demonstrated that the newly implemented editor was able to provide consistent marking and individual feedback for all SQL parts. This means that the main aim of this research has been fulfilled, since the workload of the lecturers has been reduced, and students’ performance in formulating SQL statements has been improved.</div