A multi-national , multi-institutional study of asse ssment of programming skills of first-year CS student s Report by the ITiCSE 2001 Working Group on Assessme nt of Programming Skills of First-year CS Students

In computer science, an expected outcome of a stude nt’s education is programming skill. This working group investigated the programming competency students ha ve as they complete their first one or two courses in computer science. In order to explore options for assessing students, the working group developed a trial asses sm nt of whether students can program. The underlying go al of this work was to initiate dialog in the Computer Sc ience community on how to develop these types of assessme nts. Several universities participated in our trial asse ssment and the disappointing results suggest that many stu dents do not know how to program at the conclusion of the ir introductory courses. For a combined sample of 216 students from four universities, the average score was 22.89 out of 110 points on the general evaluation c riteria developed for this study. From this trial assessme nt we developed a framework of expectations for first-yea r courses and suggestions for further work to develop more comprehensive assessments.