Web-based Management and Assessment System for Postgraduate Research Symposium of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS

This research project is to develop a management system that computerizes the process of managing and assessing in educational organizations. It will be applied in the case of postgraduate research symposium in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP). The society has evolved in a more modern and educational background, many countries has considered education as one of the most important factors in development. Due to the increasing number of students every year, the management and assessment processes have always been an administrative burden for academic staffs to collaborate and keep track of the student performance. The objective of this system is to become a centralized management and assessment portal for students, academic staffs, supervisors, and external examiners, which provides full control over the entire submission and evaluation processes. In the scope of UTP, the research symposium of postgraduate students is focused and the system is built on a web-based architecture which allows postgraduate students to submit their symposiums for their supervisors to evaluate and approve by digitalized assessment forms

Web-based Management and Assessment System for Postgraduate Research Symposium of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS

This research project is to develop a management system that computerizes the process of managing and assessing in educational organizations. It will be applied in the case of postgraduate research symposium in Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP). The society has evolved in a more modern and educational background, many countries has considered education as one of the most important factors in development. Due to the increasing number of students every year, the management and assessment processes have always been an administrative burden for academic staffs to collaborate and keep track of the student performance. The objective of this system is to become a centralized management and assessment portal for students, academic staffs, supervisors, and external examiners, which provides full control over the entire submission and evaluation processes. In the scope of UTP, the research symposium of postgraduate students is focused and the system is built on a web-based architecture which allows postgraduate students to submit their symposiums for their supervisors to evaluate and approve by digitalized assessment forms

Improving the reliability and validity of test data adequacy in programming assessments

Automatic Programming Assessment (or APA) has recently become a notable method in assisting educators of programming courses to automatically assess and grade students’ programming exercises as its counterpart; the typical manual tasks are prone to errors and lead to inconsistency. Practically, this method also provides an alternative means of reducing the educators’ workload effectively. By default, test data generation process plays an important role to perform a dynamic testing on students’ programs. Dynamic testing involves the execution of a program against different inputs or test data and the comparison of the results with the expected output, which must conform to the program specifications. In the software testing field, there have been diverse automated methods for test data generation. Unfortunately, APA rarely adopts these methods. Limited studies have attempted to integrate APA and test data generation to include more useful features and to provide a precise and thorough quality program testing. Thus, we propose a framework of test data generation known as FaSt-Gen covering both the functional and structural testing of a program for APA. Functional testing is a testing that relies on specified functional requirements and focuses the output generated in response to the selected test data and execution, Meanwhile, structural testing looks at the specific program logic to verify how it works. Overall, FaSt-Gen contributes as a means to educators of programming courses to furnish an adequate set of test data to assess students’ programming solutions regardless of having the optimal expertise in the particular knowledge of test cases design. FaSt-Gen integrates the positive and negative testing criteria or so-called reliable and valid test adequacy criteria to derive desired test data and test set schema. As for the functional testing, the integration of specification-derived test and simplified boundary value analysis techniques covering both the criteria. Path coverage criterion guides the test data selection for structural testing. The findings from the conducted controlled experiment and comparative study evaluation show that FaSt-Gen improves the reliability and validity of test data adequacy in programming assessments

Extending and contributing to an open source web-based system for the assessment of programming problems

This paper describes the development of a web-based pro-gramming and assessment environment for use in support-ing programming fundamentals courses (CS1, CS2) taught in Java. This environment is currently linked with WeB-WorK, an open source web-based system developed at the University of Rochester that is popular for administering and assessing mathematics and physics coursework, but is designed for the potential integration with other course man-agement system (CMS) environments. In addition to the traditional multiple-choice and short answer questions that have been augmented with the extensive randomization and customization routines of WeBWorK, this new environment (called WeBWorK-JAG where JAG stands for Java Auto Grader) can automatically collect and grade free-form pro-gram fragments written in Java. Novel pedagogy has been developed based on the capabilities of this extension and preliminary classroom results are discussed in this paper. For example, when students contributed to WeBWorK by creating WeBWorK-JAG questions for their peers, they are exposed to the reality of creating comprehensive unit tests and to the wider quality assurance aspects of formulating questions and their solution sets. This work is described in the context of an emerging commercial market for web-based programming assistants and its unique contributions are summarized

Efficient Use of Teaching Technologies with Programming Education

Learning and teaching programming are challenging tasks that can be facilitated by using different teaching technologies. Visualization systems are software systems that can be used to help students in forming proper mental models of executed program code. They provide different visual and textual cues that help student in abstracting the meaning of a program code or an algorithm. Students also need to constantly practice the skill of programming by implementing programming assignments. These can be automatically assessed by other computer programs but parts of the evaluation need to be assessed manually by teachers or teaching assistants.There are a lot of existing tools that provide partial solutions to the practical problems of programming courses: visualizing program code, assessing student programming submissions automatically or rubrics that help keeping manual assessment consistent. Taking these tools into use is not straightforward. To succeed, the teacher needs to find the suitable tools and properly integrate them into the course infrastructure supporting the whole learning process. As many programming courses are mass courses, it is a constant struggle between providing sufficient personal guidance and feedback while retaining a reasonable workload for the teacher.This work answers to the question "How can the teaching of programming be effectively assisted using teaching technologies?" As a solution, different learning taxonomies are presented from Computer Science perspective and applied to visualization examples so the examples could be used to better support deeper knowledge and the whole learning process within a programming course. Then, different parts of the assessment process of programming assignments are studied to find the best practices in supporting the process, especially when multiple graders are being used, to maintain objectivity, consistency and reasonable workload in the grading.The results of the work show that teaching technologies can be a valuable aid for the teacher to support the learning process of the students and to help in the practical organization of the course without hindering the learning results or personalized feedback the students receive from their assignments. This thesis presents new visualization categories that allow deeper cognitive development and examples on how to integrate them efficiently into the course infrastructure. This thesis also presents a survey of computer-assisted assessment tools and assessable features for teachers to use in their programming assignments. Finally, the concept of rubric-based assessment tools is introduced to facilitate the manual assessment part of programming assignments