How to adopt automatic grading in your coding course

Adopting a new automatic grading tool for your coding classroom can be a daunting task. One of the reasons many teachers choose to adopt autograding solutions is a lack of time and resources, which also leaves them unable to invest time in setting up an autograder: a computer science education catch-22.

As student numbers for computer science courses go through the roof (The Computing Research Association reported the number of CS undergraduates in the US more than doubled between 2013 and 2017), teachers and university leaders have to come up with new ways to manage larger class sizes to keep up with the increasing demand for coding classes. As discussed in an earlier article, autograding does not only solve these challenges, but also comes with many pedagogical benefits that ultimately result in better learning outcomes and higher student satisfaction. 

Over the past years, we have worked together with hundreds of institutions to successfully help them adopt autograding in their computer science courses. In this article we will share our experiences on this and discuss the challenges of adopting new innovations in the classroom and how to overcome them.

Do you need autograding?

We want to be realistic here: not all coding courses require code autograding. Traditional teaching methods still work very well in some courses, especially courses with a very small number of students, that require specialized hardware (e.g. distributed programming or robotics) or lack a coding aspect (e.g. theoretical computer science or math). 

With that being said, most courses can benefit greatly from autograding. Review the statements below:

1. I would like to add more practical code assessments to my course;
2. My course lacks a practical component to put the theory into practice;
3. Students want more intermediate feedback throughout the course;
4. I am / my graders are doing too much administrative work;
5. I / my graders do not have enough time to give feedback to all students;
6. I need to improve student results or student satisfaction.

If you feel like any of the statements above apply to your course, there’s a very good chance adopting autograding will benefit you. Teachers that adopt autograding report that they save time, save money, improve student results and improve student satisfaction, as you can read some of our case studies here.

What’s more, autograding gives them a new way of assessment that was not possible before: teachers can provide autonomous fully autograded assessments for students to practice, like UNIR did. This adds a practical component to courses or allows teachers to provide coding courses with limited resources that were not possible before. Eastern University set up a new and highly successful Data Science program thanks to autograding.