- Title
- Benchmarking introductory programming exams: some preliminary results
- Creator
- Simon; Sheard, Judy; D'Souza, Daryl; Klemperer, Peter; Porter, Leo; Sorva, Juha; Stegeman, Martijn; Zingaro, Daniel
- Relation
- 2016 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (ICER 2016). ICER '16 Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research (Melbourne 8-12 September, 2016) p. 103-111
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2960310.2960337
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- The programming education literature includes many observations that pass rates are low in introductory programming courses, but few or no comparisons of student performance across courses. This paper addresses that shortcoming. Having included a small set of identical questions in the final examinations of a number of introductory programming courses, we illustrate the use of these questions to examine the relative performance of the students both across multiple institutions and within some institutions. We also use the questions to quantify the size and overall difficulty of each exam. We find substantial differences across the courses, and venture some possible explanations of the differences. We conclude by explaining the potential benefits to instructors of using the same questions in their own exams.
- Subject
- introductory programming courses; programming exams; benchmarking; computer education
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1347174
- Identifier
- uon:29986
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781450344494
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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