Types of assessing student-programming knowledge

High failure and dropout rates are common in higher education institutions with introductory programming courses. Some researchers advocate that sometimes teachers don't use correct methods of assessment and that many students pass in programming without knowing how to program. In this paper authors describe the assessment methodology applied to a first year, first semester, Biomedical Engineering programming course (2015/2016). Students' programming skills were tested by playing a game in the first class, then they were assessed with three tests and a final exam, each with topics the authors considered fundamental for the students to master. A correlation analyses between the different types of tests and exam questions is done, to evaluate the most suitable, for assessing programming knowledge, showing that it is possible to use different question types as a pedagogical strategy, to assess student difficulty levels and programming skills, that help students acquire abstract, reasoning and algorithm thinking in an acceptable level. Also, it is shown that different forms of questions are equivalent to assess equal knowledge and that it is possible to predict the ability of a student to program at an early stage.