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Assessment of programming: pedagogical foundations of exams

Authors:

Angela Carbone,

Margaret HamiltonAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '13: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education

Pages 141 - 146

https://doi.org/10.1145/2462476.2465586

Published: 01 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Previous studies of assessment of programming via written examination have focused on analysis of the examination papers and the questions they contain. This paper reports the results of a study that investigated how these final exam papers are developed, how students are prepared for these exams, and what pedagogical foundations underlie the exams. The study involved interviews of 11 programming lecturers. From our analysis of the interviews, we find that most exams are based on existing formulas that are believed to work; that the lecturers tend to trust in the validity of their exams for summative assessment; and that while there is variation in the approaches taken to writing the exams, all of the exam writers take a fairly standard approach to preparing their students to sit the exam. We found little evidence of explicit references to learning theories or models, indicating that the process is based largely on intuition and experience.

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Index Terms

Assessment of programming: pedagogical foundations of exams
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ITiCSE '13: Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education

July 2013

384 pages

ISBN:9781450320788

DOI:10.1145/2462476

General Chair:
Janet Carter
University of Kent, UK
,
Program Chairs:
Ian Utting
University of Kent, UK
,
Alison Clear
Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology, NZ

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

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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Bilkent University: Bilkent University
SIGCSE: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 July 2013

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ITiCSE '13

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Bilkent University
SIGCSE

ITiCSE '13: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education conference 2013

July 1 - 3, 2013

Canterbury, England, UK

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ITiCSE '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 51 of 161 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3663649.3664368
Rivera-Alvarado EGuadamuz S(2024)A Proposal for a Standard Evaluation Method for Assessing Programming Proficiency in Assembly LanguageIntelligent Sustainable Systems10.1007/978-981-99-8031-4_17(183-192)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8031-4_17
Rivera-Alvarado EGuadamuz S(2024)A Design of Experiments Approach for Assessing Programming Performance in Assembly LanguageICT for Intelligent Systems10.1007/978-981-97-5799-2_23(253-261)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-5799-2_23
Riese EBälter O(2022)A Qualitative Study of Experienced Course Coordinators’ Perspectives on Assessment in Introductory Programming Courses for Non-CS MajorsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/351713422:4(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2022
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Bradley SBradley SDevlin M(2020)Creative Assessment in ProgrammingProceedings of the 4th Conference on Computing Education Practice10.1145/3372356.3372369(1-4)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2020
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Kurniawan OLee NPoskitt CZhang JSherriff MHeckman SCutter PMonge A(2020)Securing Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) Programming ExamsProceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3328778.3366907(880-886)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2020
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