Work in progress-comparing assessment tools in computer science education: empirical analysis

The paper discusses the usage of multiple-choice and open-ended constructed response questions for measuring the performance of undergraduate students in computer science courses. A goal of this research is to investigate if "guessing" plays a significant role in multiple-choice answering. An experiment was constructed in two academic institutions over a two-semester period involving students in four introductory programming classes. The quizzes consisted of pairs of similar questions, where each pair contained a multiple-choice and an open-ended constructed response question of equal difficulty and weight.