Impact of C-coding self-assessment exercises on exam performance: A study in engineering education

The Bologna process has brought about a revolution in university studies since, among other things, it encourages continuous evaluations throughout the academic period. This situation causes already depleted teaching teams to have an additional workload, so automatic tools are needed to evaluate the new assignments. In the computer science field, the ideal evaluation technique would be to use automatic code evaluators (i.e., Java, C, C++, etc.). The main objective of this work is to analyze whether the use of C-coding self-assessment exercises correlates with an improvement in exam performance. For this purpose, we have collected self-assessment exercises carried out on the AulaWeb platform belonging to the Degree in Organizational Engineering and Degree in Chemical Engineering, taken in the last 5 and 3 years, respectively, in the course of Programming Fundamentals (Fundamentos de Programación) in an engineering school of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. In total, 688 students completed these assignments. The most important results are: (a) regarding the January final exam, self-assessment exercises have influence on the final grade and (b) regarding the June final exam, there are academic years where students forget to carry out programming problem of greater complexity making a negative correlation between self-assessment performance and final scores achieved.