altadmri37MillionCompilations2015
2015
37 Million Compilations: Investigating Novice Programming Mistakes in Large-Scale Student Data
Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Previous investigations of student errors have typically focused on samples of hundreds of students at individual institutions. This work uses a year's worth of compilation events from over 250,000 students all over the world, taken from the large Blackbox data set. We analyze the frequency, time-to-fix, and spread of errors among users, showing how these factors inter-relate, in addition to their development over the course of the year. These results can inform the design of courses, textbooks and also tools to target the most frequent (or hardest to fix) errors.
Authors:Amjad Altadmri
Neil C.C. Brown
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= compares two valuesNoReservedWords
Every sequence of letters and digits starting with a letter can be used as an identifierNoShortCircuit
&& and || always evaluate both operandsNoSingleLogicAnd
& is only a bitwise ANDParenthesesOnlyIfArgument
() are optional for method calls without argumentsParenthesesOnlyIfArgument
() are optional for function calls without arguments