Literate programming as an aid to marking student assignments

In a university climate that sees rising student-sta ratios and increasing workloads for academics, any mechanism that reduces the student marking and assessment process must be welcome. One possible path of improvement is to shift much of the repetitive nature of student assessment away from the academic, freeing up valuable time that can be spent more directly with students. We argue in this paper that the Literate Programming paradigm LP for short, rst proposed by Knuth 1 , can assist substantially in this assessment process. We detailsomeexperience inusingLP, rstly asaparadigm for student assignment submission, and secondly as a model to structure the semi-automated marking procedures. An electronic submission procedure is used, in which students' work is handled automatically by scripts which annotate the literate program, and extract key components for testing against model answers. Although initial experience is limited in the style of analysis that can be used, we conclud...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: ACSE
• Authors: A. J. Hurst
• Keywords: ACSE 1996, Assessment Process, Student Assignment, Student Assignment Submission, Theoretical Computer Science