Automated Generation of Computer Graded Unit Testing-Based Programming Assessments for Education

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Presented at NCS2019 2020 by

Sébastien Moffarts

Automatic assessment of code, in particular to support education, is an important feature that several Learning Management Systems (LMS) do include, at least in some extent. Several kinds of assessments can be designed, such as “fill in the following code”, “write a function that”, or “correct the bug in the following program” exercises, for example. One difficulty for an instructor is to create such programming exercises, that is, writing the statement and providing all the information necessary to the platform to grade the assessment. Another difficulty appears when the instructor wants to use his/her exercises on another LMS platform, since they have to be re-encoded into the other LMS, maybe with a complete different way to describe and configure the exercise. This paper presents a tool that can automatically generate programming exercises from one single and unique description, in several programming languages. The generated exercises can then be automatically graded by the same platform, providing intelligent feedback to the user in order to support his/her learning. This paper focuses on and details unit testing-based exercises and provides insights into new kinds of exercises that could be generated by the platform in the future, with some additional developments.