FrontDesk: an enterprise class Web-based software system for programming assignment submission, feedback dissemination, and grading automation

The problem of managing an effective relationship between course staff and students in large programming courses admits no trivial solution. Students often complain of lack of feedback, slow assignment grading times, and a gap in communication between them and the course staff responsible for evaluating their work. In addition, course staff feels powerless to help because of the complexity and sheer numbers of students involved in such courses. In this paper, we describe our Web-based distributed application, FrontDesk that attempts to bridge the feedback and communication gap that these courses suffer from. FrontDesk provides tools for students to submit their work through the Web and to receive rich, informative feedback. It provides course staff with the ability to give effective subjective feedback for large courses and to automate objective programming assignment correctness testing in a flexible, distributed, and efficient manner.