Gary Yngve

My Head-TA duties included writing grading scripts for each assignment, a time-pressured task of one per week. The goal of the scripts were to save the TAs time so they wouldn't have to test the students' programs (or at least for 95% of the students) and to be more thorough, consistent, and reliable than a human grader. Furthermore my scripts produced a pretty output that included TA desires such as the number of late days used. My scripts have been used reused many times since.

Some challenges of the scripts included making the scripts robust (one test is independent of another test, infinite loops are killed after a specified wait time), and dealing with the fact that beginning students don't follow specs and don't spell words correctly, but still expect partial credit. In addition, some assignments were nondeterministic (generating random strings from a context-free grammar or playing a guessing game), which required further trickery (building a parser, measuring distributions, communicating with PipedInput/OutputStreams). Scripts for graphical assignments produced webpages with javascripted mouseovers of student vs correct as well as image diffs. I don't have any screenshots or samples available right now due to confidentiality issues regarding either the students code or the criteria, but I am working on a mock-up to show here. NOTE: THIS TANGENT IS TOO LONG. MOVE TO SEPARATE PAGE.