ABSTRACT

Lidemar Halide, An Automatic Assessment System for the Web-based Programming Language Courses (supervised by Zahir Zainuddin and Rhiza S. Sadjad)

This is a research project to develop an automatic assessment system for programming language courses. Assessing the performance of students who are taking a programming language course is always a time-consuming task for the instructors. A statistical analysis by taking samples of 4 (four) instructors assessing the performance of 25 students taking a Java Programming course at the State Polytechnic of Ujungpandang, Makassar, South Sulawesi, INDONESIA has shown that in average they have to spend a total of .......... hours of their time in a semester to grade the students' papers and programs. This task includes grading 10 programming assignments and a final test, and computing the final results.

The program is developed using the PHP programming tools for web application integrated into the Moodle package of Course Management Systems (CMS). Three types of problems are considered: (i) short essays, completion of sentences, (ii) multiple choices and (iii) programming. The feature of this assessment system is for grading process of the third type of problems, i.e. the programming problems. The software automatically compiles and runs the program written by students and evaluates the results. The final results of the evaluation can be set not only as a simple logical “right” or “wrong” result, but also as a more detail grading levels of “excellent” (A), “good” (B) and “poor” (C) result. 

Using this program, the grading process of 10 programming assignments and a final test taken by 25 students in a Java programming course can be reduced significantly to only .......... seconds in total.