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From: mcintyre@rpics.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Automatic Grading of Student Programs
Message-ID: <1104@rpics.RPI.EDU>
Date: Sun, 12-Apr-87 19:00:55 EST
Article-I.D.: rpics.1104
Posted: Sun Apr 12 19:00:55 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 17-Apr-87 00:37:36 EST
References: <1365@uvacs.CS.VIRGINIA.EDU> <818@xanth.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Lines: 24
Keywords: Let the students do their own grading!

In article <818@xanth.UUCP>, kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
> An instructor here, Mr. John Caywood (caywood@xanth.UUCP, xanth.cs.odu.edu, if
> anyone wants to approach him directly), has a very nice system for grading
> programming assignments.  He made himself an expert in UNIX(tm) csh or sh
> scripts to make this work.
> 
> First, his assignments are very explicit.  The required results are an exact
> string of bytes (including newlines as appropriate) which the student program
> must send to stdout.

	While forcing the students to have exactly the same output might
make the grading much easier, I think that such policies prevent the
students from having any good ideas as far as input and output.
	The programming student should be encouraged to not only choose
the best algorithms to solve a problem, but also should be encouraged to
find the best input and output formats for a problem.  Let's not stifle
a student's creative impulses.


-- 
Dave "mr question " McIntyre
	
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