COURSE ASSESSMENT REDESIGN IN ASSEMBLY LANGUAGES

Knowledge and skills assessment has always been problem in the courses devoted to programming languages, whether it was assembly or higher level programming language. To master the programming language, the students should solve various problems using the language. That is why the programming courses assessment process often adopt the following schema.
The lab exercises are based on more or less individually allocated assignments that the students can solve at school or at home. The solutions are then evaluated by teachers and the gained points typically form a part of the overall course assessment. The second part is usually formed by an exam, sometime supplemented by some midterm tests.
Several issues have to be taken into account concerning the mentioned assessment schema:
• It is not possible to prevent students trying to cheat in lab assignments (e.g. copy the solutions).
• Lab teachers can just check up students’ understanding asking them some checkout questions or asking for some minor changes in their solutions (difficult and time consuming task).
• Different teachers might use various scales for assignments evaluation (assessment objectivity can not be guarantied).
• Midterm tests and exam test should checkout the knowledge, understanding as well as practical skills the students gained.
• The tests should be objective and suitable for large number of students.

Systems that automatically assess student programming assignments (requirements satisfaction, programming style, originality etc.) have been designed and used for over forty years. However, they are typically designed for one or several related programming languages. As long as C++ or Java languages are covered massively, the choice of automated assignments assessment systems devoted to assembly languages is very limited. There is other possible viewpoint: to give the students possibility to master the language by means of solving some assignments and to measure their knowledge and skills progress by means of skills-based tests.
Nowadays there is a common practice to use LCMS-type (Learning Content Management Systems) e-learning tools not only for course management, but also for on-line tests management. Most of the LCMS support only traditional types of test questions like multi-choice, True/False, gap filling, matching etc. These types of test questions are suitable when assessing students’ knowledge and understanding, but are difficult to use for programming skills evaluation.
Years ago the midterm and final exam tests in Assembly Languages course used to be done in a written form. The students were supposed to write an assembly language program on a piece of paper. Besides the fact that the students had no possibility to verify their designs, the paper work was difficult to read, correct and evaluate. With the expansion of LCMS the paper tests were replaces by on-line tests mostly with multi-choice questions. However, these on-line tests turned out to be much easier compared to paper tests. That is why the course assessment redesign was needed to get the results back to the realistic values. We used various types of test questions to prepare skills-based oriented tests, including the special Moodle activity, developed at the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies, Slovak University of Technology Bratislava. Our experience with course assessment redesign and the results compared to the previous years will be presented in the paper.