Accelerated Feedback Leads to More Empowered Learning in Programming Course

Assistant Professor of Math & Statistics Jillian Cannons wanted her computer programming courses to be more efficient and inspiring for Math majors, but faced two big hurdles. First, grading this type of work manually was extremely time consuming. It required her to build scripts and test each student submission individually, repeating the process for every submission. This was compounded by the difficulty of managing student work across email and the LMS, leaving her feeling exhausted.

Second, her students struggled to fully engage with the material. And because of the time intensive nature of her grading process, feedback and opportunities to reflect on the learning were not instantaneous, but rather occurred a fews days to a week after submission. As a result, interest in the subject matter was low, students were disheartened, and were not reaching their full potential.

A former colleague recommended Gradescope to help streamline programming assignments, provide quicker feedback, and enable better student engagement. Professor Cannons was eager to see if it could improve her grading process as well.

She was immediately impressed. Gradescope’s autograder platform enabled Professor Cannons to organize, easily access, and maintain a digital record of her students’ programming submissions. She no longer had to manage work scattered across different systems, saving her an estimated 40% in time.

Once her autograder scripts and supporting code were in place, she could run her autograders seamlessly on Gradescope’s platform, dramatically simplifying her workflow for problem sets and programming projects. She no longer needed to manually check every student’s submission one-by-one. With Gradescope, she could manually grade a subset of questions and could review assignment trends across the entire cohort. Students received near-instantaneous feedback on their submissions, and reworked the assignment until they got it right. Gradescope also helped centralize that feedback, saving them time with a one-stop hub of their work, and an opportunity to track their progress.

With these accelerated feedback loops in place, Professor Cannons saw students take greater ownership over their work and their learning. Instead of settling for a 7 out of 10, they repeatedly reworked their assignments until they got a perfect grade. This self-motivation led to greater concept mastery, and kindled a sense of passion for computer programming where it was formerly lacking.

The more she uses Gradescope, the more Professor Cannons is inspired to advocate its benefits to other instructors and departments. She leads workshops within her department and with the Center for the Advancement of Faculty Excellence so that others at Cal Poly Pomona can achieve similar improvements in student outcomes.