Automatic programming assessment and test data generation a review on its approaches

Automatic programming assessment has recently become an important method in assisting lecturers and instructors of programming courses to automatically mark and grade students´ programming exercises as well as to provide useful feedbacks on students´ programming solutions. As part of the method, test data generation process plays as an integral part to perform a dynamic testing on students´ programs. To date, various automated methods for test data generation particularly in software testing field are available. Unfortunately, they are seldom used in the context of automatic programming assessment research area. Nevertheless, there have been limited studies taking a stab to integrate both of them due to more useful features and to include a better quality program testing coverage. Thus, this paper provides a review on approaches that have been implemented in various studies with regard to automatic programming assessment, test data generation and integration of both of them. This review is aimed at gathering different techniques that have been employed to forward an interested reader the starting points for finding further information regarding its trends. In addition, the result of the review reveals the main gap that exists within the context of the considered areas which contributes to our main research topic of interest.