Formal Autograding in a Classroom
Dragana Milovančević - 6th March 2024
Speaker's Website: https://people.epfl.ch/dragana.milovancevic?lang=en
Dragana Milovančević is a PhD student in the LARA group at EPFL, under the supervision of Prof. Viktor Kunčak, and an Academic Collaborator at Birkbeck, University of London. Previously, she received her master's degree from the University of Belgrade, where she was working as a teaching assistant. Her research interests are in the field of formal verification, where she applies equivalence checking to a variety of domains, including automated grading.
In this talk, I will present our work on automated grading of programming assignments, and share our experience with using a program verifier as an autograder in our functional programming course. Our approach takes as input student submissions and reference solutions, and uses equivalence checking to automatically prove or disprove the correctness of each submission. We find that the clusters of equivalent submissions provide useful insights into different program structures, beyond those envisioned by a single reference solution. We illustrate the underlying techniques on example interactive exercises throughout the talk.