LabBack: An extendible platform for secure and robust in-the-cloud automatic assessment of student programs

In software engineering education manual assessment of students’ programs is a time consuming endeavour that does not scale to high numbers of pupils or to large amounts of practice material. Numerous automatic grading programs, aim- ing to alleviate this problem, have been developed since 1960. These, however, only support fixed programming languages and fixed assessment methods, thus prohibiting their reuse throughout different programming curricula. Educators investigating new grading methods either have to accept the engineering burden of creating a complete grading system or revert to manual grading. This thesis presents LabBack - a reusable automatic grading platform that is extendible with language- and assessment-specific functionality by means of plugins. LabBack provides the necessary infrastructure for building and hosting automatic grading functionality, eliminating the need to consider the issues of scalability and security against malicious programs. LabBack can be hosted in the cloud and provides immediate student feedback. Plugins providing automatic assessment for Scala, JavaScript and C have been implemented and LabBack has been validated in a university-level course with over 100 students.

Subject

automatic grading
scalability
cloud
plugin
plugin framework
load distribution
load packing
education
programming education

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master thesis

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