Development of Programming Capability Framework Based on Aptitude and Skill

Abstract

This paper presents overall study and proposes a framework of aptitude and skill evaluation for the first-year engineering students in a computer programming class. The research framework has been designed to study coding style and programming skill evaluation through determination of the outputs from the grader system such as time consumption, scores and other additional information. A student's submitted program is investigated to identify his style by using the readability score from readability module to find the difficulty level of a readable program source code. Resulting data from user information extraction and source code analysis has been collected to create a user profile. This user profile can describe style, aptitude and skill of a student when solving a problem by using a programming language and enable to diagnose the problem-solving trend of that student on problems in the future. The disclosed information is very important to evaluate the programming capabilities of each student and to show their programming behavior in order to provide information to the instructor to improve their students' programming skill.