SPLASH 2021
Sun 17 - Fri 22 October 2021 Chicago, Illinois, United States
Wed 20 Oct 2021 13:50 - 14:10 at Zurich E - Session 2

Enrollment in programming courses increasingly surges. To maintain the quality of education in programming courses, instructors need ways to understand the performance of students and give feedback accordingly at scale. For example, it is important for instructors to identify different problem-solving ways (named as tactics in this paper) used in programming submissions. However, because there exist many abstraction levels of tactics and high implementation diversity of the same tactic, it is challenging and time-consuming for instructors to manually tackle the task of tactic identification. Toward this task, we propose PaCon, a symbolic analysis approach for clustering functionally correct programming submissions to provide a way of identifying tactics. In particular, PaCon clusters submissions according to path conditions, a semantic feature of programs. Because of the focus on program semantics, PaCon does not struggle with the issue of an excessive number of clusters caused by subtle syntactic differences between submissions. Our experimental results on real-world data sets show that PaCon can produce a reasonable number of clusters each of which effectively groups together those submissions with high syntax diversity while sharing equivalent path-condition-based semantics, providing a promising way toward identifying tactics.

Wed 20 Oct

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13:50 - 15:10
Session 2SPLASH-E at Zurich E
13:50
20m
Talk
PaCon: A Symbolic Analysis Approach for Tactic-Oriented Clustering of Programming Submissions
SPLASH-E
Yingjie Fu Peking University, Jonathan Osei-Owusu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Angello Astorga University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Zirui Neil Zhao University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wei Zhang Peking University, Tao Xie Peking University
DOI
14:10
20m
Talk
Shrinking JavaScript for CS1
SPLASH-E
Boyd Anderson National University of Singapore, Martin Henz National University of Singapore, Kok-Lim Low National University of Singapore, Daryl Tan National University of Singapore
DOI
14:30
20m
Talk
A Stepper for a Functional JavaScript Sublanguage
SPLASH-E
Martin Henz National University of Singapore, Thomas Tan National University of Singapore, Zachary Chua National University of Singapore, Peter Jung National University of Singapore, Yee-Jian Tan National University of Singapore, Xinyi Zhang National University of Singapore, Jingjing Zhao National University of Singapore
DOI
14:50
15m
Talk
Course Experience Report: Full-Class Compiler Collaboration
SPLASH-E
Joe Gibbs Politz University of California at San Diego, Yousef Alhessi University of California at San Diego
DOI