Work

Failures in Reliably Assessing Program Code Readability

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Writing correct code is an important part of learning to program, but other attributes such as readability also matter for good code, and thus it is desirable to assess them while teaching programming. In this paper we contrast two ways of grading readability: traditional grading (taken from datasets in three different previous studies), and the use of Comparative Judgement (in a new study with 20 graders on 80 projects). We find that both grading approaches are very unreliable, calling into question whether readability of program code can feasibly be graded at all.

Source: Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

DOI: 10.1145/3769994.3770017

Authors: Neil C. C. Brown, Marcus Messer, Jennifer Ikin

Institution: King's College London

Language: English

Topic: Teaching and Learning Programming

Subfield: Computer Science Applications

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: King's College London