Feedback for Programming Assignments Using Software-Metrics and Reference Code

Feedback for student programming assignments on quality is a tedious and laborious task for the instructor. In this paper, we make use of few object-oriented software metrics along with a reference code that is provided by the instructor to analyze student programs and provide feedback. The empirical study finds those software metrics that can be used on the considered programming assignments and the way reference code helps the instructor to assess them. This approach helps the instructor to easily find out quality issues in student programs. Feedback to such assignments can be provided using the guidelines which we will be discussing. We also perform an experimental study on programming assignments of sophomore students who were enrolled in an object-oriented programming course to validate our approach. 1. Introduction Assessment of students programming assignments are mostly done by using certain criteria like functionality, design, and programming style. Moreover, giving feedback on students’ assignments is a hectic task because the instructor needs to inspect all student assignments. Many computer-aided approaches (CAAs) have been proposed for assessing student assignments and giving feedback [1]. Using software metrics to assess student programs is one of those several approaches used in CAAs. Software metrics are measures of certain aspects of a program that help to analyze and control it is quality. Researchers have found a large number of software metrics that can analyze different aspects of the source code. These software metrics can also be used by the instructor to analyze the students programing assignments and give feedback. Most of these software metrics used were related to complexity and size of the programs [2–5]. Cohesion and coupling are certain aspects of a program that measure it is relatedness and dependency. In this research, we will find out whether some metrics relating to cohesion and coupling are capable of assessing student programs and also reveal the results of an experiment that was conducted on the student assignments. As we proceed, we will be answering three questions pertaining to our research.(1)Can the object-oriented metrics assess student programs?(2)How can these metrics with reference code help the instructor in analyzing student programs?(3)Will this approach help the students? We have organized this paper into different sections. In Section 2, we perform a review about the previous related research conducted in this area. The next Section 3 explains our present idea on using software metrics and reference