The site claims that it is "Recognized worldwide as the standard in online plagiarism prevention, Turnitin helps educators and students take full advantage of the internet's educational potential." I wonder how well it does in terms of number of false positives, false negatives, etc.
The service looks at only internet content that may be the source of plagiarism and doesn't take into account that students may copy from one another.
CUPM Guidelines for Assessment of Student Learning
website
CUPM stands for the "Committee on the Undergraduate Program in
Mathematics" which is part of the Mathematical Association of
America. This article discusses three major considerations for
assessment.
Electronic peer review
In the paper "Electronic peer review and peer grading in CS courses,"
Edward Gehringer proposed and implemented a peer grading system
to review student programming assignments over Web. Students submit
their assignments to Peer Grading (PG) system. TAs or other students
are then assigned to review and grade the assignments. The system
allows interactive communication between author and reviewer where the
authors are able to update the assignments using reviewer
comments. The unique features are possibility to submit arbitrary set
of Web pages for review which allows encouraging mechanisms for
careful review of submissions. Their system includes six detail phase
for the assessment from signing up for an assignment, submission,
initial feedback, grading, review and finally to web publishing of
the final results. At the end they have suggested some features that
allows the PG system be benefitable for students in different levels.
Assessment to improve learning in higher education: The BEAR
Assessment System
paper
This paper outlines the experiences of a student in an upper level AI
class throughout a semester, discussing at each step what went wrong.
The main point of this (amusing) narrative is that if teachers don't
make regular assessment part of the learning experience for students,
they will not only get frustrated but stuggle to learn the material
effectively. The authors then propose a system of assessment to
address
common problems. The section on the assessment system seems to be
filled with diagrams and learning triangles and such, which isn't all
that interesting to me. The really great part of this paper is the
account of the student and what went wrong in the class. Some things
I took away from this are 1) timely and accurate feedback is important
2) giving points for effort can be dangerous, and instead to give
students extra points on assignments, have them maybe redo the
assignment after they've gotten feedback to correct their mistakes. 3)
when you post solutions, try to post solutions students actually could
have gotten themselves instead of 'expert' solutions. Maybe get
permission to use other students' correct answers.
Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student
Learning
website
This website addresses 9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing
Student
Learning. One of the principles is to not only assess the outcome of
students' performances, but the process to how they got there. By
understanding how they face problems, we are able to improve their
learning process. Additionally, assessment should be an ongoing
process
rather than done sporadically. This allows a measurement of
improvement
over time, where we can assess our own teaching ability and then
improve
if as we progress. Overall, the website gives a mission for
assessment.
Automatic program assessment
paper
This short paper discusses a tool built to automatically asses
programming assignments for an introductory programming class. Their
tool takes the approach of assessing code structure and return values
instead of output. Their tool is used by students online and can
provide plagiarism checks, correctness checks, automatic grading and
effectively fast feedback. A survey of students following the class
demonstrated that many students liked the system but that the
automatic feedback could be improved.
Automatic Test-Based Assessment of
Programming: A Review
paper
There has been three generations of the assessment systems from 40
years ago up until now; The first
generation of these assessment systems demanded a great deal of
expertise and when they were
supplied with test data they could keep track of running time, and
maintain second
generation of these assessment systems were tool-based systems
(command-line, GUI or script-based)
and the focus of the methodology was the correct functioning of the
program submitted. The third
generation of the assessment systems made use of developments in web
technology and adopted
increasingly sophisticated testing approaches.
We have to consider several factors for the assessment tools. First of all, the requirements must be carefully specified for these tools to work correctly. Second, graphics and graphical user interfaces are more attractive since they provide impressive-looking results. Third, the material available to the student during the test, which determines whether it is a test of memory, adaptability, or initiative. Fourth, questions requiring the student to design his or her own interface cannot be tested by these assessment tools.
Misc thoughts
The primary goals of grading are, evaluation, communication,
motivation and organization. It gives an opportunity for students to
learn from their mistakes. It also gives an idea of what the students
are supposed to learn from the course. Grading also helps the
instructors in moulding their teaching based on the performance of
students. It also allows the teacher to provide feedback on a
student's performance. The assignments must satisfy all the above
goals. The instructor must avoid assigning number of problems of the
same kind. Writing a homework becomes mechanical and students lose the
motivation to think. Since the goal of grading is to communicate
ideas, the instructor must take time to provide positive feedback on a
student's performance. Grading should not be merely a process of
assigning "Grades".
A resource from Berkeley
website
The impoverished A-F system
website
This article talks about the difficulties in assigning grades to
students. The overall concept is that a simple A-F grading system is
far too coarse and inaccurate to give an indication of how the student
is doing in the class. One issue raised in the article is that
teachers are often encouraged to use several different types of
assignments to assess the skill of the students, but are then given no
instruction about how to combine the results into a single letter
grade. This can be especially problematic because grades can be used
as qualifying marks to permit or deny students access to gifted
programs or even schools of higher education. After the teachers in
this study implemented some new types of assessment and teaching
techniques, they began to see significant changes in the performance
of their students. This implies that reevaluating the issue of
assessment is a good starting point to help students learn more
effectively.
Assessing SQL skills
paper
One of the essential ideas in the paper is that type of grading
strongly influences the students' learning approach. The tradition
grading of SQL is mainly paper based. However, in practical, designing
SQL consists of repeating verification and refinement steps. Thus, the
author proposed a online grading system AsseSQL, which is more similar
to the practical procedure of designing SQL. Evaluations show that
AsseSQL has a evident effect on motivating student to master SQL
professionally.
Teaching Software Testing: Automatic Grading Meets Test-first
Coding
paper
In this approach to teaching good code-testing practices, the
students use Test-Driven-Development (TDD) to write their code. When
the assignment is turned in, the tests written by the students are
turned in as well. The TDD helps the students find their own bugs.
The key is the assessment of the tests. If this is automated and
students can be assessed whenever they wish and if that assessment
contains code coverage information, the students are encouraged to
write more thorough tests.
On automated grading of programming assignments in an
academic institution
paper
Human grading of programming assignment is a tedious and error-prone
task. This paper studies the implementation of one automated grading
system called Online Judge. The system was successful to detect the
correctness and efficiency of a progem, but cannot determine a
program's maintainability. Besides that, they also implemented a
plagiarism detection process in the system, which can detect suspected
plagiarism, but those programs still need a further manual assessment
to the charge of plagiarism.
Assessing the assessment of programming
ability
website
The basic premise of this article is that for assessing programming
ability in students, lab exams (an exam in which students are given
several programming problems, a computer, and a couple of hours to
write
solutions which are automatically graded) are the most reliable.
These
lab exams are a form of summative assessment, but according to the
authors they also serve to motivate students' work on formative
assessments (weekly labs).
Grades in several forms of assessment among introductory students were correlated with performance on a third-year programming project; lab exams showed the highest correlation. The authors also present several arguments for why lab exams are better than other methods for measuring programming ability.
However, it is not clear from the paper what other areas besides programming ability might be useful to measure, and whether any of the other methods of assessment may be better for those.
Misc links: