Impact of auto-grading on an introductory computing course

This project presents and assesses the impact of a pedagogical tool, called Bottlenose, deployed in an introductory Computer Science course. Bottlenose is a web-based framework that accepts student submissions and presents immediate feedback. Students may submit any number of times before the assignment due date. We expect them to use the feedback from previous submissions to improve their subsequent submissions. We compared student behavior on assignments against previous semesters, which used the same assignments, but with no automated feedback system. We observed that students, when using the feedback system, make more submissions per assignment, indicating that students were leveraging feedback to improve their programs.