teaching machines

SpecCheck Questions

What do students learn by using SpecCheck? I wish my purpose were so noble. SpecCheck’s raison d’etre is to make grading easier in large lecture classes. By conditioning student code to better conform to the published specification, we graders are more likely to succeed in running functional tests—which only work if the students name things correctly, have […]

SpecCheck talk at ITiCSE 2012

This is the draft of a presentation I’m preparing to give on some of my work. This text is meant to accompany my slides. Premise This work is rooted on a single premise: grading code for two hundred first-year computer science students is painful. It’s painful for two reasons. First, two hundred of anything is […]