The Ceilidh system for the automatic grading of students on programming courses

We give an overview of the Ceilidh courseware system. This is a general purpose system supporting the provision of student programming courses, and performing all the courseware assessment and administration related to a given course. It is currently distributed to over 100 universities in 15 countries, and supports 7 courses.We will discuss first the overall structure of the system, and then summarise various different user views of the facilities it offers. This will give a good picture of the user view of the software. We will then describe more details the marking metrics and their implementation, and the effects (some of them unexpected) that the system has had on the student learning process.