The boss online submission and assessment system

TLDR

Computer programming lends itself to automated assessment, enabling measurement of program correctness and quality metrics, and facilitating plagiarism detection through regular code structure. The paper introduces BOSS, a submission and assessment system that collects student submissions, automatically tests for correctness and quality, checks for plagiarism, and offers a marking interface, aiming to support rather than constrain assessment. BOSS implements automated assessment by collecting submissions, executing automatic correctness and quality tests, detecting plagiarism, and providing a marking interface. The paper discusses pedagogic and administrative issues impacted by the assessment process.

Abstract

Computer programming lends itself to automated assessment. With appropriate software tools, program correctness can be measured, along with an indication of quality according to a set of metrics. Furthermore, the regularity of program code allows plagiarism detection to be an integral part of the tools that support assessment. In this paper, we describe a submission and assessment system, called BOSS, that supports coursework assessment through collecting submissions, performing automatic tests for correctness and quality, checking for plagiarism, and providing an interface for marking and delivering feedback. We describe how automated assessment is incorporated into BOSS such that it supports, rather than constrains, assessment. The pedagogic and administrative issues that are affected by the assessment process are also discussed.