Assessment of programming: pedagogical foundations of exams

Previous studies of assessment of programming via written examination have focused on analysis of the examination papers and the questions they contain. This paper reports the results of a study that investigated how these final exam papers are developed, how students are prepared for these exams, and what pedagogical foundations underlie the exams. The study involved interviews of 11 programming lecturers. From our analysis of the interviews, we find that most exams are based on existing formulas that are believed to work; that the lecturers tend to trust in the validity of their exams for summative assessment; and that while there is variation in the approaches taken to writing the exams, all of the exam writers take a fairly standard approach to preparing their students to sit the exam. We found little evidence of explicit references to learning theories or models, indicating that the process is based largely on intuition and experience.