Enhancing Automated Feedback in On-Going Assignments

In programming courses, test-based automated feedback systems often face a limitation: instructors cannot effectively enhance feedback during ongoing assignments. While a passing test case may adequately indicate that certain rubric criteria have been met by a student's program, failure can arise from many reasons. When a test case fails due to reasons not previously coded for, it can create confusion. This tends to divert a student's focus from genuine learning towards guessing the test. A more effective approach would be for the system to notify instructors when a test fails, rather than automatically returning a "test case failed'' message. Instructors could then diagnose the cause to provide an initial ''human-in-the-loop'' feedback. Subsequently, this feedback can be coded into the test suite. This method enables the improvement of feedback during an on-going assignment. In this poster, we propose an approach to achieve this objective and introduce a supporting tool.