Resources for Programming Course TA?

cndrr asks: "I'm a Teacher's Assistant for intro to Java at my university again this fall. The last time I taught, all the TAs had students turn in their assignments through email. I'm thinking about scripting a site that will let students turn in their programs automatically and in some cases, run the program and (based on the output) automatically grade it. Has anyone else TAed and found a good solution that they would recommend?"

Comments

Don't do it.

[Andrew Sterian]

You'll waste as much time setting up and tweaking the system as you will doing it manually. Automatic submission and sorting into folders by course section is simple enough, but running the program and automatically grading the output??? That's madness.

Besides, trying to distance yourself from your students as much as possible by using technology is the exact opposite of what teaching is supposed to be about. If the students know that a real human will be reading the output and providing constructive feedback, they're much more likely to take it seriously.

Re:Don't do it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll waste as much time setting up and tweaking the system as you will doing it manually.

It really depends on the setup at his school. When I was a TA, we had one "head TA" who would take care of making automatic grading tools, and as a result the rest of us probabaly spent a lot less time doing tedious grading then we needed to.

Besides, trying to distance yourself from your students as much as possible by using technology is the exact opposite of what teaching is supposed to be about.

Agreed, but when grading programming assignments, part of the grade comes from being able to produce the correct output, and a good automated grading tool can make sure that students are graded consistently on that. Sure, you should still grade on style and give feedback and all that, but when strictly grading the output, who really cares if it was graded by a machine?

Re:Don't do it.

[kbielefe]

It's not madness. I actually preferred my classes with automated output checking, for the following reasons:

• It forces the teacher to make very clear program specifications.
• It forces the teacher to make a reference implementation of their own assignment, so they will see for themselves where potential problems are.
• Teachers provide some sample test cases and solutions, so that students can get instant feedback on the correctness of the program, even in the middle of the night. The final grading used those test cases, and some surprise ones to make sure the students thought about the entire algorithm and didn't just write to the test cases.
• The automated grading only ever counted for maybe 70% of the grade. I never had a class with automated grading where a human didn't check for style, implementation, simple mistakes, etc.
• The grader can still look at the output of failed test cases to provide constructive feedback, but they don't have to waste their time looking at it when the student got it right.
• I always knew exactly what a certain percentage of my grade would be, before I turned in the assignment.

As for implementation, all you need is a script that compiles the student's program, runs it against the test cases, then does a diff against the output from the reference implementation, and records how many test cases passed.