Automated Programming Assignment Marking Tool

Abstract

Due to the enrolment of a very high number of students to programming modules, marking of programming modules is becoming a very tedious and time-consuming process. Programming assignments mainly test for the student’s ability to think logically and approach a solution to the problem. In that case, just running the script and checking the output will not be sufficient enough to award a grade to the student. Marking criteria of programming modules provide certain marks for programs which are not syntactically correct but still have a good approach. Therefore, the code has to be read line by line and the implementation should be checked carefully to provide marks. Source code analysis has become mandatory in the current scenario. This leads to immense pressure and heavy workload on the staff who mark these programs. Considering all these aspects manual marking can lead to inconsistency, biasness, waste of time and less accuracy. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to minimize these problems by implementing an automated programming module marking tool by converting source codes to parse trees, extracting features, generating feature vectors, comparing them and generating a mark along with a feedback and plagiarism report. The solution focuses on automation marking by source code analysis and plagiarism checking.