English

Personalized Assessments from Personal Artifacts

Software Engineering 2026-07-17 v1

Abstract

The rapid development and popularization of AI-enabled coding agents have meant software engineering students and professionals cannot be assumed to understand their own code, which risks academic integrity and professional accountability. We developed a method called Personalized Probing Puzzles (p3p^3) to evaluate students' understanding of their own code, and tested p3p^3 in a graduate-level cloud computing course. Our pilot study shows that p3p^3 can help identify potential gaps in students' understanding of their own code. The puzzles are automatically generated, asynchronously administered, and finished in minutes. Future work is needed to correlate puzzle results with code understanding and to embed p3p^3 in a professional code review process.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.16494,
  title  = {Personalized Assessments from Personal Artifacts},
  author = {Yufan Zhang and Jaromir Savelka and Seth Copen Goldstein and Majd Sakr},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16494},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures, ECTEL 2026