2026-07-23T06:06:02Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:20971 2024-09-25T10:22:30Z ddc:004 open_access

A Domain-Specific Language for Dynamic White-Box Evaluation of Java Assignments B. Caniço, Afonso Santos, André L. White-box assessment student assessment programming education Programming exercises involving algorithms typically involve time and spatial constraints. Automated assessments for such implementations are often carried out in a black-box manner or through static analysis of the code, without considering the internal execution properties, which could lead to falsely positive evaluations of students' solutions. We present Witter, a domain-specific language for defining white-box test cases for the Java language. We evaluated programming assignment submissions from a Data Structures and Algorithms course against Witter’s test cases to determine if our approach could offer additional insight regarding incomplete algorithmic behaviour requirements. We found that a significant amount of student solutions fail to meet the desired algorithmic behavior (approx. 21%), despite passing black-box tests. Hence, we conclude that white-box tests are useful to achieve a thorough automated evaluation of this kind of exercises. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Afonso B. Caniço and André L. Santos 2024 Is Part Of OASIcs, Volume 122, 5th International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2024) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2024.2 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-209715 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2024.2 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode