The final assessment of a course must reflect its goals and contents. An important goal
of our introductory programming course is that the students learn a systematic approach for the
development of computer programs. Having the programming process a as learning objective
naturally raises the question how to include this in assessments. Traditional assessments (e.g. oral,
written, or multiple choice) are unsuitable to test the programming process.
We describe and evaluate a practical lab examination that assesses the students’ programming
process as well as the developed programs. The evaluation is performed in three ways: by analyzing
the results of four lab examinations (with more than 1100 students), by semi-structured individual
interviews with representatives of the involved persons (students, teaching assistants (TAs), lecturer,
and examiner) and by an experiment to evaluate the impact of the assignment text on the
programming process.
The result of the evaluation is encouraging and indicates the value of alignment and strong conformity
between goal, content and assessment of the introductory programming course.tionn