On the Differences in Time That Students Take to Write Solutions to Programming Problems

Abstract

Full research paper-In this work, we study productivity differences in an introductory programming course. Focusing on a set of students who completed all programming assignments in the course, we quantify differences in productivity, measured through the time spent on completing the assignments. We focus both on the overall time needed to complete all programming assignments in the course, as well as on time spent on individual programming assignments. In addition, the effect of previous programming experience and difficulty of the programming assignment is considered. Our results show significant productivity differences between students. In addition, while programming experience influences productivity, a proportion of students who have never programmed before are faster in completing the programming assignments than students with considerable amounts of previous programming experience. Our results suggest that the classic credit-based or lecture hour based workload estimates of a course fit poorly to the whole course population in programming, suggesting that programming courses and training should be adjusted based on the participant.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Programs

“…In education, stereotypes and personal understanding can affect a student's attitude to whether programming is something they could engage in; for example, the idea of a "geek gene" (that some people are inherently born as programmers) is a commonly held view despite being widely refuted [2,49,63,101,102] (although there can be significant differences between outcomes for students in programming courses, and in the time taken to write programs). Even the misconceptions that parents have about programming can have a flow on effect onto how well their children do in computer science [81].…”

Does the Early Bird Catch the Worm? Earliness of Students' Work and its Relationship with Course Outcomes

“…Interestingly, we found that when examining students grouped by how many days before the deadline they started to work on assignments and how many days they worked (see Figure 4), in some cases for students who start on the same day, those who end up working on fewer days tend to perform better in the course on average. One possible explanation for this is that high performing students require fewer days to complete assignments -prior work has shown that there are substantial differences in the time it takes students to solve programming problems [11]. However, this also means that at least some students who exhibit the "ideal" work habits of both starting early and working on multiple days will nevertheless perform poorly in the exam.…”