The DOI matches its Crossref record.
A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students
Open accessAbstract
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
A multi-national study of reading and tracing skills in novice programmers
Lister, R., Adams, E. S., Fitzgerald, S., Fone, W., Hamer, J., Lindholm, M., McCartney, R., Moström, J. E., Sanders, K., Seppälä, O., et al. (2004) · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · doi:10.1145/1041624.1041673 · Cited by 575
Self-citationStudents’ Misconceptions and Other Difficulties in Introductory Programming: A Literature Review
Qian, Y., & Lehman, J. (2018) · ACM Transactions on Computing Education · doi:10.1145/3077618 · Cited by 529
A systematic literature review of automated feedback generation for programming exercises
Keuning, H., Jeuring, J., & Heeren, B. (2019) · ACM Transactions on Computing Education · doi:10.1145/3231711 · Cited by 370
Why students drop out CS1 course?
Kinnunen, P., & Malmi, L. (2006) · Proceedings of the second international workshop on Computing education research · doi:10.1145/1151588.1151604 · Cited by 342
Visual tools for teaching machine learning in K-12: A ten-year systematic mapping
Gresse von Wangenheim, C., Hauck, J. C. R., Pacheco, F. S., & Bertonceli Bueno, M. F. (2021) · Education and Information Technologies · doi:10.1007/s10639-021-10570-8 · Cited by 130
Metadata
- Authors
- McCracken, M., Almstrum, V., Diaz, D., Guzdial, M., Hagan, D., Kolikant, Y. B.-D., Laxer, C., Thomas, L., Utting, I., & Wilusz, T.
- Venue
- Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2001-12
- Pages
- 125-180
- OpenAlex
- W2033086912
- Cited by
- 626
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 13.64
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/572133.572137
- The paper
- McCracken, M., Almstrum, V., Diaz, D., Guzdial, M., Hagan, D., Kolikant, Y. B.-D., Laxer, C., Thomas, L., Utting, I., & Wilusz, T. (2001). A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students. Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education. https://doi.org/10.1145/572133.572137
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
