Fully automatic assessment of programming exercises

Abstract

Automatic assessment of programming exercises has become an important method for grading students' exercises and giving feedback for them in mass courses. We describe a system called Scheme-robo, which has been designed for assessing programming exercises written in the functional programming language Scheme. The system assesses individual procedures instead of complete programs. In addition to checking the correctness of students' solutions the system provides many different tools for analysing other things in the program like its structure and running time, and possible plagiarism. The system has been in production use on our introductory programming course with some 300 students for two years with good results.