Towards improving programming habits to create better computer science course outcomes

Abstract

We examine a large dataset collected by the Marmoset system in a CS2 course. The dataset gives us a richly detailed portrait of student behavior because it combines automatically collected program snapshots with unit tests that can evaluate the correctness of all snapshots. We find that students who start earlier tend to earn better scores, which is consistent with the findings of other researchers. We also detail the overall work habits exhibited by students. Finally, we evaluate how students use release tokens, a novel mechanism that provides feedback to students without giving away the code for the test cases used for grading, and gives students an incentive to start coding earlier. We find that students seem to use their tokens quite effectively to acquire feedback and improve their project score, though we do not find much evidence suggesting that students start coding particularly early.