Tracking Students' Internet Browsing in a Machine Exam

Traditionally, introductory computer science courses have focused on teaching programming, and have not included teaching information retrieval skills. However, a large part of a programmeru0027s time is spent looking at documentation or browsing the internet for guidance on how to solve the small subtasks that programming often consists of or which library to use for a specific need. We have developed a browser-plugin that tracks how students use online resources during a machine exam. Such a tool could be used -- for example -- to detect whether there is a difference between the browsing behavior of high- and low-performing students. To this end, we conduct a case study with the tool where we examine studentsu0027 browsing in a lab-based programming exam. In the future, the tool could be used to examine studentsu0027 browsing and possibly inform decisions on how to teach information retrieval skills to students.