Framework for Evaluation of Programming Language Examinations - Computational Intelligence Techniques for Comparative Genomics - page 115

language and tests. At the end, examiner personally checks each student program
and evaluates. This is time consuming and repetitive task. Often the evaluation is
not perfect. Also there is scope for bias and complaints from students. Hence, there
is a need to automate the evaluation process. The evaluation process includes
checking of the compilation errors, testing of logic and results and ef

ciency of the
program. In this paper, a framework is developed for performing practical exami-
nation/evaluation covering the above-mentioned evaluation process. The use of
computerized tools can reduce the limitations of manual process. Computerized
evaluation ensures uniformity of marking scheme because it has the same inference
mechanism for checking all the answers/programs. Automation can ensure speedy
result declaration.
Practical examinations for computer science education include project work,
assignments, and programming experiments. The already available tools focus only
on the evaluation of programming assignments and competitions. The framework
developed in this paper can be used for classroom environment, for assessment, for
competitions, and also for conducting nal examination of students at the end of

semester.
The paper is organized as follows. The review of related work in practical
evaluation tools is given in Sect. 2 . The framework and its working are given in
Sect. 3 . The list of algorithms, tools, and techniques used for evaluation are dis-
cussed in Sect. 4 . Conclusions and scope for future work is mentioned in Sect. 5 .

2 Review of Related Work

Jackson and Usher [ 1 ] developed a computer-based evaluation tool called ASSYST.
This tool evaluates computer science practical assignments of C and ADA language.
It only assists in evaluation. It assesses computer programs on four parameters:
correctness, style, ef ciency, and complexity. RoboProf [ 2 ] is an online teaching

system based on the World Wide Web technology. RoboProf teaches syntax and
structure of C++ programming language to students and assesses the exercises
students solve. BOSS [ 3 ] is an online submission system, which provides features
for course management and automated testing. It could evaluate C, C++, and Java
programs. It makes use of JUnit for testing. Mooshak tool was developed in 2003 by
Leal and Silva [ 4 ]. Mooshak is online programming contest managing software.
It helps in conduct, answer evaluation, result declaration, and feedback. The lan-
guages supported by default are C, Pascal, C++, and Java. In 2009, Garc

í a-Mateos

and Fern n[ 5 ] and Montoya-Dato et al. [ 6 ] used Mooshak for algo-

rithms and data structures course.
Douce et al., in 2005 [ 7 ], developed Automated System for Assessment of
Programming (ASAP) project which

á ndez-Alem á

ts into the e-learning framework as an
evaluation tool. Mandal et al. discussed, in their paper published in 2006 [ 8 ], the
architecture of an automatic program evaluation system. This system can handle
only C programs. Their approach is to perform white box test, instead of, black box