Web-based Grading: Further Experiences and Student Attitudes

Abstract

This paper describes recent improvements to and experiences with Web-based grading software that has been developed by the author at Ohio University. The software, named WBGP for the web-based grading project, provides facilities to build, test, and annotate student source code with comments concerning programming style and documentation. The software produces a collection of Web-pages for each student project that describes the results of testing, the grading decisions, and the resulting score. The software is able to build student portfolios consisting of all students projects for a given course. In addition, the software is able to generate reports on the type and frequency of grading comments and the correctness of student projects. The paper describes continued experiences in web-based grading of computer science projects at Ohio University. In particular, we describe the various challenges of grading interactive student projects. Finally, this paper describes the results of a student survey concerning the web-based grading software. Students were surveyed concerning the ease of use and understanding of the generated Web-pages, their attitudes towards students portfolios, and their attitudes towards web-based grading. In general, the students responses were positive