Using an automatic marking system for programming courses

All students (about 1000) at Sapporo Gakuin University are required to take a Computer Literacy course. At Hokkaido University, we teach courses, such as AI Programming, with approximately 100 students. By using automatic marking systems of our own design we can check student work and obtain the results immediately. It reduces our labor, enables us to grasp individual students' learning states, and allows us to tailor our instruction to each student's needs. Automatic marking is a key technology for determining the current individual learning state of each student in a large class. By using automatic marking we can conduct short tests many times, mark the tests automatically, and collect detailed information about the learning states of students from the test results. However, developing reliable and efficient marking systems is a difficult and time-consuming job using conventional methods. In this paper, we introduce our automatic marking systems, share our experiences developing and using the systems in our classes, and discuss the possibility of expanding its use to object-oriented programming language courses.