25 July, 2014

Teaching Assistant IT105 - Automation in Assignment Assessment

I am now a final year under-graduate. According to the institute policy, now I am eligible to be a half-time teaching assistant or a research assistant, and invest my time constructively apart from my academic work. I am in talk with professor Sanjay Srivastava of IT105 course, Introduction to Programming for the freshman under-graduates and would be probably, a teaching assistant for this course.

The strength of the students who would be taking this course will be approximately 300, which increased last year due to an increase in number of seats intake. Previously, the assignments were uploaded on course-moodle website and the assignments were submitted as a zip folder containing individual files. Downloading each file, compiling each program and running it to check for the output individually was a very tedious job. Also, it was very difficult to detect plagiarism. Due to all these drawbacks, the lab-component was graded based on the majorly vivas and not considering the coding assignment, which was unfair to some extent. There was a dire need for some kind of automation, which would make the entire process transparent, less tedious and less erroneous. There are two options for this - either write a lot of scripts and make it run or use some kind of online judge.

Two of the most popular online judge are spoj and hackerrank. Analyzing the pros and cons of both and fulfillment of the needs in each, use of spoj was finalized. I will walk you through the steps in next post of making a closed system for a group, where you can put up assignments, contest and problems, students can submit their codes and you can check for codes. The correctness of the solution need not be individually checked i.e. you can provide some sample test cases and some hidden test cases to judge the solution.

The next post will give you an insight on how you can set up the system which would lessen your burden and ease your life. Stay tuned !

No comments:

Post a Comment