"Mailing it in"

Abstract

The automated assessment of student programming assignments is now considered to be in its third generation. Today, these server-based systems use web front-ends and employ sophisticated testing techniques. While automated assessment has proven its benefits over the last 40 years, these systems are simply not feasible for many scenarios because of their infrastructure, support or training requirements. Today's extensible email clients are capable of handling many of the functions performed by these modern assessment systems without requiring extra infrastructure. This paper summarizes experiences using graphical email-clients that were extended to support menu-activated automated processing of a student-submitted program sent as an email message or attachment. The email-client automatically captured the results of the automated assessment in an email window for instructor annotation. This client-based system provides many of the same benefits as those provided by web-based systems.