Lic. Sc. (Tech.) Petri Ihantola will defend his dissertation “Automated Assessment of Programming Assignments: Visual Feedback, Assignment Mobility, and Assessment of Students’ Testing Skills” on Friday December 9th, 2011 at 12 o’clock noon in Hall T2 at the Computer Science building, Konemiehentie 2, Espoo.
The thesis explores technical aspects of automated assessment of programming assignments with the focus on visual feedback, use of web-browsers to produce feedback, and use of mutation analysis to give feedback from unit tests written by students.
Uploading students’ code to a server for testing is not the only way to give automated feedback. Most modern platforms are web based, creating an opportunity to describe visualizations in JavaScript and HTML embedded into textual feedback, or even do the whole assessment client-side. This makes it easier to add automatically assessed programming exercises to learning environments originally not be designed to support such assignments. Mutation analysis, where a large number of (faulty) programs are automatically derived from the program under test, turns out to be an effective way to detect students’ tests otherwise fooling our assessment systems.
The opponent is Prof. Tapio Salakoski from University of Turku. The thesis is supervised by Prof. Lauri Malmi from Aalto University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Doctoral thesis is available in http://lib.tkk.fi/Diss
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