On the Number of Attempts Students Made on Some Online Programming Exercises During Semester and their Subsequent Performance on Final Exam Questions

This paper explores the relationship between student performance on online programming exercises completed during semester with subsequent student performance on a final exam. We introduce an approach that combines whether or not a student produced a correct solution to an online exercise with information on the number of attempts at the exercise submitted by the student. We use data collected from students in an introductory Java course to assess the value of this approach. We compare the approach that utilizes the number of attempts to an approach that simply considers whether or not a student produced a correct solution to each exercise. We found that the results for the method that utilizes the number of attempts correlates better with performance on a final exam