Computer-Based Assessment System Applied to Programming Education

Abstract

Academic institutions around the globe have been adopting E-learning systems. The main advantage of these systems is to give tutors a better “monitoring” of the learning process , hence diminishing the distance between them and the student through this system, The impact of this system on programming education is significant. It ‘s vitally crucial for I.T. students to solve as many as possible programming challenges in order to grasp complex concepts and algorithms as well as working with different programming languages. The combination of a considerable amount of exercises with a high number of students is putting a great pressure on teaching staff in many Universities. Nevertheless, this process of assessing and monitoring can be aided by using a specific kind of e-Learning systems, the Computer Based Assessment (CBA) systems. This work proposes a new CBA system for programming courses in the University of Tlemcen. The system was specified to support five different programming languages C, C++, Csharp, Java and Python, set up on a Windows 10 machine that acts as a server, which other students (clients) connect to. In order to achieve the proposed goals, a number of steps were followed and the results are detailed in this document. A study of state-of-the-art CBA systems was performed on four systems. Then a requirement analysis was made specifically for the University of Tlemcen, based on that and the study of the state of the art, the first C.B.A system prototype was developed and the proposed product was later discussed