DICE, a Parse Tree Based On-Line Assessment System

Abstract: We introduce an on-line automatic assessment system named DICE for a test-based assignment tutoring and problem solving environment. Our system uses a file system based policy to organize the assignments provided by instructors and the data that was turned in from students. The system will compile and execute student programs against instructor-provided test cases, and then assign a grade based on the program output. The answers of students were organized and kept for future use in knowledge discovery and concept retrieval, etc. The parse trees of student answers were used for plagiarism detection. All functions were accomplished on a distributed, client-server, OS independent and GUI application-based platform. The students were asked to write their assignments in class, and they got the responses immediately from our assessment system. We found that our system significantly reduced the burden of the teachers. Obviously, in our experiment, the students of C and Java language programming courses were encouraged to complete their assignments by themselves