MAESTRO: a semi-autoMAted Evaluation SysTem for pROgramming assignments

Many works in the literature highlight the importance of formative assessment to improve the learning process. Formative assessment means providing assignments to the students and giving them feedback during the course. It is not very used in Italian Universities because it is highly time-consuming for the professors, that typically do not have help in the process of homework grading.In this work, we focus on programming exercises in computer science subjects, and propose a tool to semi-automatically grade and give feedback to the students. The tool was used in a computer language course on functional programming in a M.Sc. degree; the students evaluation of the course show a steep increase in the students appreciation. The tool is currently used in a course at undergraduate level on C programming.