Automatic Grading of Student Code with Similarity Measurement

  • Dongxia Wang
  • , En Zhang
  • , Xuesong Lu*
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Nowadays, online judges are extensively used for automatically grading student code. However, they grade code by only counting the number of passed test cases, which is not fair for assessing the overall quality of a code snippet. On the other hand, existing studies have used machine learning techniques for code grading. However, they usually require large amounts of labeled code to enable supervised learning and heavily rely on feature engineering. In this work, we design SimGrader, a code grading system that grades student code based on the measurement of similarity to the “good” code, and thus save the effort for code labeling. We extract three types of features to capture the overall quality of a code snippet, and design specific methods to enhance the feature discrimination, which facilitates the similarity measurement. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of SimGrader over existing methods and justify the effect of the its system components. We deploy SimGrader to grade the student code submitted in an introductory programming course.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2022, Proceedings
EditorsMassih-Reza Amini, Stéphane Canu, Asja Fischer, Tias Guns, Petra Kralj Novak, Grigorios Tsoumakas
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages286-301
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783031264214
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event22nd Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2022 - Grenoble, France
Duration: 19 Sep 202223 Sep 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13718 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference22nd Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2022
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityGrenoble
Period19/09/2223/09/22

Keywords

  • Code grading
  • Contrastive learning
  • Discriminative feature
  • Tree edit distance

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