A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students

  • Authors:

  • Michael McCracken;Vicki Almstrum;Danny Diaz;Mark Guzdial;Dianne Hagan;Yifat Ben-David Kolikant;Cary Laxer;Lynda Thomas;Ian Utting;Tadeusz Wilusz

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology;University of Texas at Austin;Georgia Institute of Technology;Georgia Institute of Technology;Monash University, Australia;Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel;Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology;University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK;University of Kent, UK;Cracow University of Economics, Poland

  • Venue:
  • Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In computer science, an expected outcome of a student's education is programming skill. This working group investigated the programming competency students have as they complete their first one or two courses in computer science. In order to explore options for assessing students, the working group developed a trial assessment of whether students can program. The underlying goal of this work was to initiate dialog in the Computer Science community on how to develop these types of assessments. Several universities participated in our trial assessment and the disappointing results suggest that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. For a combined sample of 216 students from four universities, the average score was 22.89 out of 110 points on the general evaluation criteria developed for this study. From this trial assessment we developed a framework of expectations for first-year courses and suggestions for further work to develop more comprehensive assessments.