On the Impact of Programming Exercise Descriptions

This paper examines the effects of exercise descriptions and supplied hints to achieved scores and required working times of programming exercises within a MOOC. We conducted an A/B test on more than 2.400 students using an exercise with four descriptions differing in clarity, description detail, order of presented instructions and presence or absence of exemplary program output. Results show that the expressiveness and structure of the instructions influence the required work times as well as the number of issued program runs. We suggest further experimentation to outline effects on programming errors and to determine guidelines for optimal exercise descriptions.