Detecting Functional Differences using Automatic Test Generation for Automated Assessment in Programming Education

Software testing is being leveraged in programming education for automated assessment of programming assignments. When using software testing in programming education, program specifications are provided as unit or integration tests, and students create programs that pass these tests. Although this method has various advantages, such as ensuring objective program specifications and automating the operation check, it also has many disadvantages. For example, detecting innovations, such as original specifications and functional extensions by an individual student, is difficult. The purpose of this research is to automatically detect functional differences among student programs in programming education using tests. In our proposed method, automatic test generation is applied to student programs, and the generated tests are mutually executed for other student programs. Furthermore, we classify the tests based on the execution path to obtain sets of tests that are capable of detecting functional differences.