Web-CAT  Home  People Auto Grader  Overview  TDD for Java  TA Markups  Old Web-CAT Site Revising CS1  Overview  Topic Sequence  Course Notes  Lab Assignments  Program Assignments  Reading List On-line Modules  Overview  Module 1  Module 2  Module 3  Module 4 Tablet PCs  Overview  Lecture Uses  In Lab Other Projects  PnP PEBB  RSRG			The Web-CAT Grader was inspired by the Virginia Tech Curator. It is a web-based, automated submission and grading system for programming assignments. The Web-CAT Grader supports traditional models of automated program grading, but also supports grading of assignments where students do their own testing. It helps encourage test-driven development (also called test-first coding), where students write small unit tests for each piece of code they add. Web-CAT allows a student to submit his or her test cases along with the solution, and grades on test validity and test completeness as well as code correctness. The current version of the Web-CAT Grader has processed over 10,000 student submissions during the Fall 2003 semester, serving approximately 280 students spread across nine sections of two courses. This is the pilot semester for the project at high volumes but with a limited number of courses. Experimental results from an upper division course in Spring 2003 are briefly described in some of the publications below. A journal submission to ACM's Journal of Educational Resources in Computing that provides full details of the experimental evaluation carried out in the spring is currently under review. The most important result obtained in the spring was a 45% reduction in the estimated bug density of student code (bugs per thousand non-commented source lines of code). Papers Stephen H. Edwards. Software system summary: Web-CAT: web-based center for automated testing. an unpublished summary of Web-CAT's objectives and contributions, including screenshots walking through its most basic features. Stephen H. Edwards. Teaching software testing: Automatic grading meets test-first coding. In Addendum to the 2003 Proceedings of the Conference on Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications. 2003. (See a one-page reduced version of the actual poster.) Stephen H. Edwards. Rethinking computer science education from a test-first perspective. In Addendum to the 2003 Proceedings of the Conference on Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications. 2003. Stephen H. Edwards. Using test-driven development in the classroom: Providing students with concrete feedback on performance. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Education and Information Systems: Technologies and Applications (EISTA'03). August 2003. Stephen H. Edwards. Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs. Journal of Educational Resources in Computing, to appear. Stephen H. Edwards. Using software testing to move students from trial-and-error to reflection-in-action. In Proc. 35th SIGCSE Technical Symp. Computer Science Education, ACM, to appear 2004. M.S. Thesis Anuj R. Shah. Web-CAT: A Web-based Center for Automated Testing. (Abstract.) M.S. Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2003.