Take Note: the Effectiveness of Novice Programmers' Annotations on Examinations

Abstract

This paper examines results from a multiple-choice test given to novice programmers at twelve institutions, with specific focus on annotations made by students on their tests. We found that the question type affected both student performance and student annotations. Classifying student answers by question type, annotation type (tracing, elimination, other, or none), and institution, we found that tracing was most effective for one type of question and elimination for the other, but overall, any annotation was better than none.

Keywords

• student assessment
• tracing
• annotation
• code reading
• test strategies