Automatic program assessment using static and dynamic analysis

Programing skills are one of the main competencies students in computer science disciplinary have to develop as well as in different other technical and scientific disciplines. This justifies the increasing number of students involved in programing course and explains the huge amount of tests and exercises meant to be corrected. Therefore, the use of automated program assessment systems is obviously imminent. The purpose of the current paper is to make a comparative review on the methods used in automated program grading systems: static analysis and dynamic analysis. Through this comparison, we are considering both technical and pedagogical issues of the mentioned methods. Also we present a novel automated program assessment tool and the initial results from its experimentation.