Automated programming assessment using the pseudocode comparison technique: does it really work?

Abstract

Automated programming assessment is a method to evaluate and grade students' programming exercises aided by the computer. This application is developed to assess student C programming exercises based on the pseudocodes. The purpose of developing this application is to find the percentage of the pseudocode similarity between student???s answer and the instructor's scheme. The method used in the software is by translating the students' programming answer and all the instructors' answer schemes into pseudocode. The software will compare the students pseudocode with all the pseudocode from the instructors' answer schemes. The highest percentage of similarities will be chosen for the mark. A test has been carried out to compare marks given by the software against the marks given manually by the instructor. The result is discussed in this paper.