Work in progress — Programming assignment summary for analysis, qualitative assessment and continuous improvement in CS1 — CS3

Homework assignments are essential for skills development in a first or second year programming course (CS1 - CS3), and instructors who assign homework in CS1 - CS3 would like submitted solutions to accurately reflect student performance. Unfortunately, this is hard to gage when students increasingly have access to solutions on the internet and are frequently encouraged to collaborate. To address these concerns, we incorporated a summary into the list of programming assignment requirements. Though it serves many roles, including as a vehicle for analysis of course topics, it´s most important role is as qualitative measure of an individual students´ performance (which indirectly informs their quantitative assessment). This paper describes this assignment summary: including its original purpose, example analysis and summary questions, textual analysis of student responses, and preliminary correlations between responses and student assignment scores.