CSE 101 Autograder
The CSE 101 course at Michigan State University is a computer competency course taken by students from various majors. Many majors require students to take this (or a similar course). As a result of this, enrollment in this course is high (1500 per regular semesters). This course is taught by 60 staff members, most of them Teaching Assistants working 10-20 hours a week.
Sample bridge task result that is evaluated by the auto grader.
In CSE 101, students attain grades by passing evaluations known as bridge tasks. Students can take bridge tasks once a week at most. Each bridge task raises a student's grade. Bridge tasks must be passed in order, a student must pass a bridge task before taking one at the higher grade level.
To achieve consistency, criteria based evaluations were created. To pass a bridge task, students must pass all mandatory criteria, and a set number of optional ones.
The grading of each Bridge Task requires a significant amount of time. Each week more than 1000 bridge tasks must be graded consistently by about 60 graders. If the gjhrading is late, students may miss out on an opportunity to take the next bridge task
Auto grader
An auto grading system was created for CSE 101. The auto grader reads students files and parses and reads the files according to what is needed in the criteria. The auto grader then passes or fails the relevant criteria.
There are four topics in CSE 101, word, web, spreadsheets and databases. The auto grader is able to grade the web and databases. This is because both web and databases require a rigid type of syntax.
My contribution to the software has mainly been on creating the database auto grader. To do this, the auto grader finds the correct SQL representation of a query. The auto grader then parses the various clauses (SELECT, FROM, WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, and ORDER BY) and determines if the clauses are complete according to the criteria. If the field and table names for a clause is the correct one, then the auto grader passes the criterion, otherwise it fails the criterion.
Result
The use of the auto grader has significantly improved time for grading. In the Fall Semester of 05 (where there was no auto grader), the number of BTs graded per hour for CSE 101 is on average 5.6. In the spring semester of 2009, the number of BTs graded per hour is on average 9.8. This is an increase in speed of over 43%. In fact we are able to cut the hours for grading by around 1000 hours/semester.
The auto grader significantly increases bridge task grading time.
Technical Details
- Created using mysql and PHP
- accessDB reader was used to read the access database. Parsing was done using the Perl module.
- Timeframe: January 2007-December 2009