An Online Programming Assessment Tool

The role of assessment in modern university curricula has become far more diverse and open to scrutiny in recent years. Although its most significant role is as a measure of a student's knowledge and skills, the role as a learning device has become increasingly important and as a consequence informative and useful feed back is critical to achieve good learning outcomes This paper describes a tool that provides a self-contained, easy to use, programming environment that facilitates the development, testing and marking of programming tasks in addition to the presentation and marking of "standard" examination questions. The tool takes responsibility for many of the tasks that program development normally requires so that the student can focus on the task of writing program source code. It has been used in a Java programming topic for two consecutive years.