skip to main content
10.1145/3159450.3159456acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessigcseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

The Effect of Reporting Known Issues on Students' Work

Published: 21 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Students in Computer Science programming courses often have difficulty with coding, which results in flawed exercises. We asked students working on programming exercises to report known defects in their submission. We distinguish between three types of defects: bugs in the program, missing features, and poorly written code. Results show that students detect and report missing features and bugs quite accurately (59% of the bugs and 61% of the missing features were reported), but they are much less aware of the quality of their code (only 28% of the code issues were reported). After comparing their grades to the grades of the previous year we argue that the request to report defects helps student in submitting exercises with fewer bugs. Finally, the students affirmed that the request to report defects helped them in detecting problems and improved their time management.

References

[1]
http://listserv.acm.org/scripts/wa-ACMLPX.exe?A2=ind1701A&L=SIGCSE-MEMBERS&D=0&P=5942
[2]
Ahmadzadeh M., Elliman D., Higgins C.(2009) An analysis of patterns of debugging among novice computer science students. In Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. pp. 84--88.
[3]
Fowler M., Beck K. (2000) Bad Smells in Code. in Refactoring: Improving the De- sign of Existing Code, Addison-Wesley, 2000, pp. 75--88.
[4]
Foley J., Murphy C.(2002), Q&A: Bill Gates On Trustworthy Computing, Information Week, Available on-line: http://www.informationweek.com/qanda-bill-gates-on-trustworthy-computing/d/d-id/1015083
[5]
Guzdial, M. (2011) Education: from Science to Engineering. CACM. 64(2). pp 37--39.
[6]
Bryce, R.C., Cooley, A., Hansen, A., Hayrapetyan, N.(2010) A one year empirical study of student programming bugs. In: Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2010 IEEE, pp. 1--7.
[7]
Harsley R., FossatiD.,Di Eugenio B., Green N. (2017) Interactions of Individual and Pair Programmers with an Intelligent Tutoring System for Computer Science. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education pp. 285--290.
[8]
Kirsh A., Gaber I. (2016) Satisfaction, Time Investment and Success in Students' Programming Exercise. Proceedings of the Programming Experience 2016 (PX/16) Workshop pp. 9--20.
[9]
McCartney, R., Boustedt, J., Eckerdal, A., Sanders, K., Zander, C. (2013). Can first-year students program yet?: a study revisited. Proceedings of the Ninth Annual International ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, pp. 91--98.
[10]
McCracken, M.,Almstrum, V., Diaz, D., Guzdial M., Hagan D., Ben-David Kolikant Y., Laxer C., Thomas L., Utting I., Wilusz T. (2001). A multinational, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin 33(4), pp. 125--180.
[11]
Murphy C., Kim E., Kaiser G., Cannon A.(2008) Backstop: A tool for debugging runtime errors. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin.40(1) pp. 173--177.
[12]
Trivedi, P., Pachori, S.(2010) Modelling and Analysis of Software Defects Prevention Using ODC, International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), Vol. 1, No. 3, pp 75--77.
[13]
Vegso, J. (2010) Freshman interest in cs and degree production trends. Available on-line: www.cra.org/wp/index.php?p=126.
[14]
Williams L., Kessler R. (2002) Pair Programming Illuminated.
[15]
Wilson J.D., Hoskin N., Nosek J.T. (1993) The benefits of collaboration for student programmers. Proceedings of the twenty-fourth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education. pp. 160--164

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Introducing Code Quality in the CS1 ClassroomProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3649405.3659535(773-774)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2020)An empirical study of how novice programmers search the web for helpJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3447065.344707136:2(42-52)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2020

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 2018
1174 pages
ISBN:9781450351034
DOI:10.1145/3159450
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 February 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. code quality
  2. known issues
  3. object-oriented course
  4. software defects
  5. students perception
  6. students' exercises

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

SIGCSE '18
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

SIGCSE '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 459 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

Upcoming Conference

SIGCSE TS 2025
The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
February 26 - March 1, 2025
Pittsburgh , PA , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)16
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
Reflects downloads up to 09 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Introducing Code Quality in the CS1 ClassroomProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3649405.3659535(773-774)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2020)An empirical study of how novice programmers search the web for helpJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3447065.344707136:2(42-52)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2020

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media