Towards Automatic Assessment of Object-Oriented Programs

The computing education community has shown a long-time interest in how to analyze the Object-Oriented (OO) source code developed by students to provide them with useful formative tips. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an approach to analyze how students use Java and its language constructs. The approach is implemented through a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) and it is based on the analysis of the most common violations of the OO paradigm in the student source code. Moreover, the IDE supports the automatic generation of reports about student's mistakes and misconceptions that can be used by instructors to improve the course design. The paper discusses the preliminary results of an experiment performed in a class of a Programming II course to investigate the effects of the provided reports in terms of coding ability (concerning the correctness of the produced code).