Oto, a generic and extensible tool for marking programming assignments

Abstract

Marking programming assignments in programming courses involves a lot of work: each program must be tested, the source code must be read and evaluated, etc. With the large classes encountered nowadays, the feedback provided to students through marking is thus rather limited, and often late. Tools providing support for marking programming assignments do exist, ranging from support for administrative aspects through automation of program testing or support for source code evaluation based on metrics. In this paper, we introduce a tool, called Oto, that provides support for submission and marking of assignments. Oto aims at reducing the workload associated with the marking task. Oto also aims at providing timely feedback to the students, including feedback before the final submission. Furthermore, the tool has been designed to be generic and extensible, so that the marking process for a specific assignment can easily be customized and the tool can be extended with various marking components (modules) that allows it to deal with various aspects of marking (testing, style, structure, etc.) and with programs written in various programming languages. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Systematic Literature Review of Assessment Tools for Programming Assignments

“…However, when a student performs a submission, the tool carries out a preliminary assessment of the solution, which usually consists of executing a small test suite against the student program. Tools that implement this strategy include BOSS [22,23,24], OTO [25,26,27] and PASS [28,29,30].…”

A marking language for the oto assignment marking tool

“…In a previous paper [13], we presented Oto, a tool providing support for the submission and marking of programming assignments. Oto can be used to provide early feedback to students, even before the final submission.…”

“…Various tools providing support for marking programming assignments are available: tools dealing with administrative aspects (submission and management of assignments) [2], metrics-based evaluation [11], testing of programs [3,8], etc.-see [13,Sect. 2] for a more detailed presentation of these and other tools.…”

Extending a marking tool with simple support for testing

“…Various tools providing support for marking programs are available [2], including Oto [4], a customizable and extensible marking tool which can provide feedback to students even before the final submission.…”