Measuring Students' Performance On Programming Tasks

Large scale learning systems for introductory programming need to be able to automatically assess the quality of students' performance on programming tasks. This assessment is done using a performance measure, which provides feedback to students and teachers, and an input to the domain, student and tutor models. The choice of a good performance measure is nontrivial, since the performance of students can be measured in many ways, and the design of measure can interact with the adaptive features of a learning system or imperfections in the used domain model. We discuss the important design decisions and illustrate the process of an iterative design and evaluation of a performance measure in a case study.