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Title: Who Tests the Testers? Avoiding the Perils of Automated Testing
Instructors routinely use automated assessment methods to evalu- ate the semantic qualities of student implementations and, some- times, test suites. In this work, we distill a variety of automated assessment methods in the literature down to a pair of assessment models. We identify pathological assessment outcomes in each model that point to underlying methodological flaws. These the- oretical flaws broadly threaten the validity of the techniques, and we actually observe them in multiple assignments of an introduc- tory programming course. We propose adjustments that remedy these flaws and then demonstrate, on these same assignments, that our interventions improve the accuracy of assessment. We believe that with these adjustments, instructors can greatly improve the accuracy of automated assessment.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1714431
PAR ID:
10093712
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
Page Range / eLocation ID:
51 to 59
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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