Promoting Code Quality via Automated Feedback on Student Submissions
Oscar Karnalim, Simon
Abstract
This research-to-practice work-in-progress paper presents an automated feedback tool that can be used in many teaching environments by integrating it with a web-based assessment submission system. Each time a student submits their work, they will automatically get feedback about aspects of the code quality. Automated feedback tools have been developed to educate students about code quality. However, integrating such a tool into an existing teaching environment can be challenging as these tools can depend on particular working environments, can be separate from the assessment submission system, or can require historical data. Our initial evaluation shows that the tool can be helpful as students do sometimes neglect to satisfy all code quality requirements. However, some false results are expected for spelling correction as student programs are not written in natural language. According to our quasi-experiments, the tool substantially reduces the number of word misspellings in comments due to their substantial frequency of occurrence.