Improving Grading Outcomes in Software Engineering Projects Through Automated Contributions Summaries

Teaming is a key aspect of most professional software engineering positions, and consequently, team-based learning (TBL) features heavily in many undergraduate computer science (CS) and software engineering programs. However, while TBL offers many pedagogical benefits, it is not without challenges. One such challenge is assessment, as the course teaching staff must be able to accurately identify individual students’ contributions to both encourage and reward participation. In this paper, we study improvements to grading practises in the context of a CS1.5 introductory software engineering course, where assessing individual students’ contributions to weekly lab assignments is done manually by teaching assistants (TAs). We explore the impact of presenting TAs with automated summaries of individual student contributions to their team’s GitHub repository. To do so, we propose a novel algorithm, and implement a tool based off of it, AutoVCS. We measure the impact on grading metrics in terms of grading speed, grading consistency, and TA satisfaction. We evaluate our algorithm, as implemented in AutoVCS, in a controlled experimental study on Java-based lab assignments from a recent offering of NC State University’s CS1.5 course. We find our automated summaries help TAs grade more consistently and provides students with more actionable feedback. Although TAs grade no faster using automated summaries, they nonetheless strongly prefer grading with the support of them than without. We conclude with recommendations for future work to explore improving consistency in contribution grading for student software engineering teams.