automatically grading small programming assignments

[Andrew Sackville-West]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2006 at 06:44:37AM +0000, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 12:27:07 -0500, Brian Blais <bblais at bryant.edu>
> declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
> 
> 
> > I envision a number of possible solutions.  In one solution, I provide a function 
> > template with a docstring, and they have to fill it in to past a doctest.  Is there a 
> > good (and safe) way to do that online?  Something like having a student post code, 
> > and the doctest returns.  I'd love to allow them to submit until they get it, logging 
> > each attempt.
> >
> 	I have some problems with the concept behind the last sentence... It
> encourages brute-force trial&error coding (unless you are going to tell
> them that each submittal gets logged, AND that multiple submittals will
> reduce the final score they get for the assignment).

its been decades since I was in a programming course... salt
accordingly.

Whenever I learn a new language, I spend a LOT of time just hacking
stuff and seeing what it does -- learning syntax and effects by trial
and error. Since I already know (okay, knew) good coding practice, the
resulting code would not look like it had been hacked together in such
a manner, but if I was graded on how many times I executed a bit of
code, I'd fail right out. Now, maybe in the second or third semester
of a particular language, that might make sense -- the student should
already understand syntax and effects well enough to avoid that stuff.

.02 from a python newb.

A
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