Max Fowler

Background and Context: Some skills taught in introductory programming courses are categorized into 1) explaining code, 2) arranging lines of code in correct sequence, 3) tracing through the execution of a program, and 4) writing code from…

The development of effective autograders is key for scaling assessment and feedback. While NLP based autograding systems for open-ended response questions have been found to be beneficial for providing immediate feedback, autograders are…

To complete an open-ended programming exercise, students need to both plan a high-level solution and implement it using the appropriate syntax. However, these problems are often autograded on the correctness of the final submission through…

Reading and understanding code are fundamental skills for novice programmers, and especially important with the growing prevalence of AI-generated code and the need to evaluate its accuracy and reliability. ``Explain in Plain English''…

"Explain in Plain English" (EiPE) questions are widely used to assess code comprehension skills but are challenging to grade automatically. Recent approaches like Code Generation Based Grading (CGBG) leverage large language models (LLMs) to…

Reading, understanding and explaining code have traditionally been important skills for novices learning programming. As large language models (LLMs) become prevalent, these foundational skills are more important than ever given the…