On Software Verification and Graph Similarity for Automated Evaluation of Students ’ AssignmentsI

The number of students enrolled in universities at standard and online pro-gramming courses is huge. This calls for automated evaluation of students assignments and for automated support for learning. We aim at developing methods and tools for objective and reliable au-tomated grading that can also provide substantial and comprehensible feed-back. The benefits should be twofold — reducing the workload for teachers and providing high quality feedback to students in the process of learning. We introduce software verification and control flow graph similarity mea-surement in automated evaluation of students ’ programs. Our new grad-ing framework merges outcomes obtained by combination of these two ap-proaches with outcomes obtained by automated testing. We present our corresponding tools that are publicly available and open source. The tools are based on a low-level intermediate code representation which enables that they can be applied to a number of programming languages. Experimental evaluation of the proposed grading framework is performed on a corpus of university students ’ programs written in programming lan