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What are we thinking when we grade programs?

Published: 06 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports on a mixed methods study which examines how four experienced instructors approached the grading of a programming problem. Two instructors used a detailed, analytic approach and two instructors employed a holistic approach. One instructor exhibited elements of a primary trait approach. Even though the four instructors used different grading scales and philosophies, their raw scores were highly correlated (Spearman's rho of .81) supporting the conclusion that experienced instructors usually agree on whether a program is 'very good' or 'very bad'. Clearly there is no single right way to grade programs. Further discourse should be encouraged for the benefit of both educators and students.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '13: Proceeding of the 44th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2013
818 pages
ISBN:9781450318686
DOI:10.1145/2445196
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 March 2013

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Author Tags

  1. grading
  2. programming
  3. rubrics
  4. scoring

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SIGCSE '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 111 of 293 submissions, 38%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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  • (2024)Automated Assessment: Does It Align With Teachers' Views?Proceedings of the 19th WiPSCE Conference on Primary and Secondary Computing Education Research10.1145/3677619.3678113(1-10)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Towards Automated Assessment of High School Programming2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10343243(1-9)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
  • (2022)Automating the Assessment of Algorithms and Programming Concepts in App Inventor Projects in Middle SchoolResearch Anthology on Computational Thinking, Programming, and Robotics in the Classroom10.4018/978-1-6684-2411-7.ch025(524-549)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2021)Customizing Feedback for Introductory Programming Courses Using Semantic ClustersIntelligent Tutoring Systems10.1007/978-3-030-80421-3_30(279-285)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Automating the Assessment of Algorithms and Programming Concepts in App Inventor Projects in Middle SchoolHandbook of Research on Tools for Teaching Computational Thinking in P-12 Education10.4018/978-1-7998-4576-8.ch004(76-102)Online publication date: 2020
  • (2020)Is automated grading of models effective?Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems10.1145/3365438.3410944(365-376)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2020
  • (2020)Adaptive RubricsProceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3328778.3366946(549-555)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2020
  • (2020)How Plans Occur in Novices' ProgramsProceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3328778.3366870(852-858)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2020
  • (2019)Clustering Recurrent and Semantically Cohesive Program Statements in Introductory Programming AssignmentsProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3357384.3357960(911-920)Online publication date: 3-Nov-2019
  • (2019)Assessment and PlagiarismThe Cambridge Handbook of Computing Education Research10.1017/9781108654555.015(414-444)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2019
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