An online system for monitoring and assessing the programming process

Abstract: Traditional assessment of programming ability, as well as more recent automated assessment systems, consider only the completed program submitted by the student. We present a system which automatically monitors and assesses the codeproduction process as well as the final product, allowing adaptive feedback and assessment of programming competency. Our assessment system is based on open-source components which provide a full online programming environment and allows for a flexible scripting interface to the assessment process, which can monitor student actions during the programming task. The system was implemented for an introductory programming class of nearly 400 students, and an example of the automated assessment is presented