An approach towards automatic testing of student programs using token patterns (original) (raw)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many universities use software systems to assess student programs by means of automatic testing, but most of these systems suffer from the technical limitation of requiring rigidly defined output formats. As such, a program that implements the correct algorithm is often rejected as incorrect due to minor non-conformance of its output. We propose a new approach to assessing the correctness of students' program outputs based on token patterns. Introduction To relieve the manual mundane tasks of assessing students' work in computer programming courses, many universities have developed software systems to automatically test students' programs by executing them with a set of test cases [1 – 4]. Most of these systems determine the correctness of a program by comparing its output to the correct output, often using the approach of direct character-by-character matching. This approach requires that the precise and detailed form of the output be given in the specification of the problem, and any slight deviation (such as an extra punctuation) will cause the match to fail. The demand of strict coherence to the required format is often regarded by students to be too harsh and is sometimes pedagogically unsatisfactory, for it may unnecessarily confine the way of implementation or indirectly disclose unintended hints to the solution [3, 4, 6, 7]. This paper briefly describes the problems with existing approaches (Section 1), proposes a new approach based on token patterns (Section 2), and outlines our further work (Section 3).

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