Work-in-progress: program grading and feedback generation with Web-CAT

Abstract

Web-CAT, the Web-based Center for Automated Testing, is the most widely used open-source automated grading system for programming assignments in the world. Web-CAT is customizable and extensible, allowing it to support a wide variety of programming languages and assessment strategies. Web-CAT is most well known as the system that "grades students on how well they test their own code," with experimental evidence that it offers greater learning benefits than more traditional output-comparison grading. This work-in-progress demonstration will show how Web-CAT can be used to automatically grade student work, assess conformance with coding style guidelines, provide students with feedback on how well they have tested their own code, and allow instructors to provide directed hints to students on where to focus their attention for improvements.