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This is very timely. For the past few years I have been teaching a programming course to small groups of beginning students, generally no more than 15. The go

This is very timely. For the past few years I have been teaching a programming course to small groups of beginning students, generally no more than 15. The goal is teach them the basics over the course of a semester, and we usually get there. The only downside is that it takes me about 30 minutes to review each assignment (there are two a week) and write feedback to the student. With 15 hours of grading a week, it seems hard to imagine teaching much bigger sections. I went to a small college, so my programming courses were typically about the same size, 10-20 students. How do larger sections work in terms of getting feedback from professors? It seems critical, especially early on, to be able to understand the way students are trying to solve problems and then give them guidance how to get there. That seems to require more than "yes/no your code passed the unit test."

cheepin 11y ago
Well, in my university's intro programming class, there were a couple hundred people. Grade-wise, the unit tests said it all. You didn't get personal feedback unless you asked for it. The test framework would email you the test cases and what your output was versus the expected, so a lot of times you could figure out your mistake (or bad assumption) without asking the professor. The professor would have the grading details on the whole class so if we missed a lot of points on a particular problem, they would concentrate on that for a bit. If you needed personalized feedback, you could ask the professor questions after class, at office hours, at the discussions section to your TA, or at the TA's office hours. There just wasn't personalized feedback based on your assignments.
xixixao 11y ago
At Imperial, 3rd and 4th years are Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (get paid a little for it) and mark the exercises every week for two trimesters. It's a great system, both for the 1st years and for the older students "teaching" (had been on both sides).
teach 11y ago
I'm a high school teacher, and I currently have 4 sections of an intro Java course with 28 students each. (And I also teach an additional 36 students in two sections of the follow-up course.) Each student does 1-3 small programs per class day, and I grade them all by reading the code and making comments. (I'm grading in another tab as I write this; I have 91 files to mark before 2:15pm today which is the output of a single section for a single class day.) I've written tools to help me evaluate and make comments on the files extremely quickly. So that's what I do.
spenrose 11y ago
Are you aware of softwarecarpentry.org ? Unlike OP, their curriculum is based on education research, and refined over more than a decade.
tsumnia 11y ago
I teach Java and Python intro courses at two different colleges (both < 30 per class), and the way I've developed my courses are very unit test driven. The reason is when I hand graded, it would take easily hours to finish grading everything. Likewise, students would submit code they copy/pasted from the internet and wouldn't compile. After 5 minutes of debugging their code, it begins eating into my overall grading time. Likewise, what percentage should I give them on code that doesn't compile? Now, I say a flat "if it doesn't compile, the best you get is 20% for proper formatting". In the first few weeks, I use JUnit and System Rules (I am currently build Python unit tests) to let them only work via the main method. Once we introduce methods, I show them how I call them via my tests. I have also started implementing typing exercises into my weekly work, so students can get a feel before getting thrown to the wolves on the week's assignments. If I head to PyCon next year, I hope to present on whether it was successful or not. I am looking to automate grading ala Open edX style submissions, as the biggest problem I have is not being able to give students a grade/notes until around Friday when I grade. One trick I do is lecture all of Monday (2 hour class) and then let them work on their assignment for the week on Wednesday (3 hours). Most students don't realize how much time outside of class needs to be spent in the initial semesters of programming. I use that lab time to let them work and act as a helpful tool if they have questions. For example, this week, we'd gone over building Objects, but the idea of constructors are still shaky to some people. Today, when they were working on their labs, I spent some time with the 1-2 students that needed a little extra help understanding the work to get everything.
- bobochan 11y ago
  Thanks to everyone for their excellent suggestions. One of my reservations about going to an automated testing and grading approach is that the course evaluations consistently say that the personalized feedback is an important reason that they took the course. But the fact is that line by line analysis of every submission does not scale, and teaching X times as many sections means that compromises will have to be made. I am not worried about the top and middle thirds of the students, they largely sail through on their own with pretty minimal guidance from me (it is an intro course and many of them have strong backgrounds). The bottom third of the class is new to programming though, so hopefully they will take more advantage of lab and office hour time to solicit help.

cheepin 11y ago

Well, in my university's intro programming class, there were a couple hundred people. Grade-wise, the unit tests said it all. You didn't get personal feedback unless you asked for it. The test framework would email you the test cases and what your output was versus the expected, so a lot of times you could figure out your mistake (or bad assumption) without asking the professor. The professor would have the grading details on the whole class so if we missed a lot of points on a particular problem, they would concentrate on that for a bit. If you needed personalized feedback, you could ask the professor questions after class, at office hours, at the discussions section to your TA, or at the TA's office hours. There just wasn't personalized feedback based on your assignments.

xixixao 11y ago

At Imperial, 3rd and 4th years are Undergraduate Teaching Assistants (get paid a little for it) and mark the exercises every week for two trimesters. It's a great system, both for the 1st years and for the older students "teaching" (had been on both sides).

teach 11y ago

I'm a high school teacher, and I currently have 4 sections of an intro Java course with 28 students each. (And I also teach an additional 36 students in two sections of the follow-up course.) Each student does 1-3 small programs per class day, and I grade them all by reading the code and making comments. (I'm grading in another tab as I write this; I have 91 files to mark before 2:15pm today which is the output of a single section for a single class day.) I've written tools to help me evaluate and make comments on the files extremely quickly. So that's what I do.

spenrose 11y ago

Are you aware of softwarecarpentry.org ? Unlike OP, their curriculum is based on education research, and refined over more than a decade.

tsumnia 11y ago

I teach Java and Python intro courses at two different colleges (both < 30 per class), and the way I've developed my courses are very unit test driven. The reason is when I hand graded, it would take easily hours to finish grading everything. Likewise, students would submit code they copy/pasted from the internet and wouldn't compile. After 5 minutes of debugging their code, it begins eating into my overall grading time. Likewise, what percentage should I give them on code that doesn't compile? Now, I say a flat "if it doesn't compile, the best you get is 20% for proper formatting". In the first few weeks, I use JUnit and System Rules (I am currently build Python unit tests) to let them only work via the main method. Once we introduce methods, I show them how I call them via my tests. I have also started implementing typing exercises into my weekly work, so students can get a feel before getting thrown to the wolves on the week's assignments. If I head to PyCon next year, I hope to present on whether it was successful or not. I am looking to automate grading ala Open edX style submissions, as the biggest problem I have is not being able to give students a grade/notes until around Friday when I grade. One trick I do is lecture all of Monday (2 hour class) and then let them work on their assignment for the week on Wednesday (3 hours). Most students don't realize how much time outside of class needs to be spent in the initial semesters of programming. I use that lab time to let them work and act as a helpful tool if they have questions. For example, this week, we'd gone over building Objects, but the idea of constructors are still shaky to some people. Today, when they were working on their labs, I spent some time with the 1-2 students that needed a little extra help understanding the work to get everything.

bobochan 11y ago
Thanks to everyone for their excellent suggestions. One of my reservations about going to an automated testing and grading approach is that the course evaluations consistently say that the personalized feedback is an important reason that they took the course. But the fact is that line by line analysis of every submission does not scale, and teaching X times as many sections means that compromises will have to be made. I am not worried about the top and middle thirds of the students, they largely sail through on their own with pretty minimal guidance from me (it is an intro course and many of them have strong backgrounds). The bottom third of the class is new to programming though, so hopefully they will take more advantage of lab and office hour time to solicit help.