automatically grading small programming assignments

[Paul Rubin]

Brian Blais <bblais at bryant.edu> writes:
> Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to grade such things by hand, so
> I would like to automate it as much as possible.
> ...
> Or perhaps there is a better way to do this sort of thing.  How do
> others who teach Python handle this?

I think you should not attempt this.  It means grading the program on
pure functionality.  Writing good code is about more than
functionality; it's also about communicating with humans.  Supplying a
doctest is a reasonable idea but students should just run the test
themselves until their code passes, no need to log all their debugging
attempts.  When they submit something that passes the test, you should
read the code and supply some feedback about about their coding style
and so forth.  This matters as much as the pure issue of whether the
program works.  Imagine an English teacher wanting to grade class
papers automatically by running them through a spelling and grammar
checker without reading them.  If the workload of grading manually is
too high, see if you can bring on an assistant to help.