Towards Deep Learning Models for Automatic Computer Program Grading
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Automatic grading of computer programs has a great impact on both computer science education and the software industry as it saves human evaluators a tremendous amount of time required for assessing programs. However, to date, this problem lacks extensive research from the machine learning/deep learning perspective. Currently, the traditional auto-grading systems are mostly based on test-case execution results. However, these approaches lack insight into the syntax and semantics of the codes, and therefore, are far from human-level evaluation. In this study, we leverage the power of language models pre-trained on programming languages. We introduce two simple deep architectures and show that they consistently outperform the shallow models built upon extensive feature engineering approaches by a high margin. We also develop an incremental transductive learning algorithm that only requires a single reference solution to a problem and takes advantage of the correct implementations in the set of programs to be evaluated. Furthermore, our human evaluation results show that the proposed approaches provide partial marks having a strong correlation with marks given by human graders. We prepare and share a dataset of C++ and Python programs for future research (Code and data are available at https://github.com/peter-nagy1/Deep-Grader).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it