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A multi-national, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students
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.
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Cited by
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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
Why students drop out CS1 course?
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Becker, B. A., Denny, P., Pettit, R., Bouchard, D., Bouvier, D. J., Harrington, B., Kamil, A., Karkare, A., McDonald, C., Osera, P.-M., et al. (2019) · Proceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education · doi:10.1145/3344429.3372508 · Cited by 199
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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
- ACM SIGCSE Bulletin
- Published
- 2001-12
- Volume
- 33
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 125-180
- ISSN
- 0097-8418 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4251415961
- Cited by
- 424
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 19.30
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- 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. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1145/572139.572181
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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.
