Introduction of the automated assessment of homework assignments in a university-level programming course

Modern teaching paradigms promote active student participation, encouraging teachers to adapt the teaching process to involve more practical work. In the introductory programming course at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, homework assignments contribute approximately one half to the total grade, requiring a significant investment of time and human resources in the assessment process. This problem was alleviated by the automated assessment of homework assignments. In this paper, we introduce an automated assessment system for programming assignments that includes dynamic testing of student programs, plagiarism detection, and a proper presentation of the results. We share our experience and compare the introduced system with the manual assessment approach used before.