Paper Info
Title
Paper vs. Computer-based Exams: A Study of Errors in Recursive Binary Tree Algorithms.
Abstract
This paper reports on a study of goal-plans and errors produced by students who wrote recursive solutions for a binary tree operation. This work extends a previous study of difficulties CS2 students experienced while writing solutions on paper-based exams. In this study, participants solved the same recursive binary tree problem as part of a hands-on computer-based exam where students had access to an IDE and Java API documentation. Not surprisingly, students who took the computer-based exams were more successful than those who took the paper-based exams (58% vs. 17% correct solutions). However, even with the advantage of access to an IDE, documentation, and test cases, 42% of students taking the computer-based exam still made errors, indicating that students exhibit persistent errors even with support. The most common errors observed included incorrect calculations, missing method calls and missing and incorrect base cases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2839509.2844587
SIGCSE '16: The 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education Memphis Tennessee USA March, 2016
Field
DocType
ISBN
Data structure,Programming language,Computer science,Arithmetic,Binary tree,Test case,Application programming interface,Documentation,Java,Multimedia,Recursion,Binary search tree
Conference
978-1-4503-3685-7
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Scott Grissom117187.64
Laurie Murphy226324.95
Renée A. McCauley3407.08
Sue Fitzgerald440351.22