Test My Code

Abstract

We describe an automated assessment system called Test My Code (TMC) that is designed to support instructors’ and students’ work in programming courses. From the students’ point of view, TMC is a transparent assessment service that is integrated to an industry-standard programming environment. TMC is used to provide scaffolding of students’ learning during the working process, and to retrieve and update exercises as the students work on them, without causing additional overhead to the learning process. From the instructors’ perspective, TMC makes collaborative crafting of exercises easier, supports building exercises with smaller goals that combine into bigger programs, gathers snapshots from students’ programming process, collects feedback from students, and has the capability to export course submission data into external systems. TMC has been used in massive open online courses on programming as well as in courses on web-development with hundreds of students.