Javista Automated Assessment of Imperative Programs

Abstract: This thesis presents a methodology and a tool for automated assessment of programming exercises,with the purpose of reducing the workload of teachers. Our aim is for the tool to provide accurateand useful assessment given an exercise specification. Using the tool could allow teachers to spendmore time helping students. The tool, implemented in Haskell, is intended to be used by teachersthrough a command line interface and targets a subset of Java. Assessment is achieved by usingsemantic and behavioural analysis. Semantic analysis consists of normalisation and prefix trees,while behavioural analysis consists of testing including integrated shrinking. The presented tool isevaluated using a data set from the course TDA450 at Chalmers University of Technology. Thetool managed to classify 60% of the solutions as either correct or incorrect with no false positives.The result shows that it is possible to automatically assess student solutions and suggests thatmore solutions can be classified given further development.