A Fast and Accurate Machine Learning Autograder for the Breakout Assignment
In this paper, we detail the successful deployment of a machine learning autograder that significantly decreases the grading labor required in the Breakout computer science assignment. This assignment — which tasks students with programming a game consisting of a controllable paddle and a ball that bounces off the paddle to break bricks — is popular for engaging students with introductory computer science concepts, but creates a large grading burden. Due to the game’s interactive nature, grading defies traditional unit tests and instead typically requires 8+ minutes of manually playing each student’s game to search for bugs. This amounts to 45+ hours of grading in a standard course offering and prevents further widespread adoption of the assignment. Our autograder alleviates this burden by playing each student’s game with a reinforcement learning agent and providing videos of discovered bugs to instructors. In an A/B test with manual grading, we find that our autograder reduces grading time by 44%, while slightly improving grading accuracy by 6%, ultimately saving roughly 30 hours over our deployment in two offerings of the assignment. Our results further suggest the practicality of grading other interactive assignments (e.g., other games or building websites) via similar machine learning techniques.
Fri 22 MarDisplayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change
10:45 - 12:00 | LLM - toolsPapers at Oregon Ballroom 204 Chair(s): Geoffrey Herman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | ||
10:45 25mTalk | Evaluating Automatically Generated Contextualised Programming ExercisesGlobal Papers Andre del Carpio Gutierrez The University of Auckland, Paul Denny The University of Auckland, Andrew Luxton-Reilly The University of Auckland DOI | ||
11:10 25mTalk | A Fast and Accurate Machine Learning Autograder for the Breakout Assignment Papers Evan Liu Stanford University, David Yuan Stanford University, Syed Ahmed Oakland University, Elyse Cornwall Stanford University, Juliette Woodrow Stanford University, Kaylee Burns Stanford University, Allen Nie Stanford University, Emma Brunskill Stanford University, Chris Piech Stanford University, Chelsea Finn Stanford University DOI | ||
11:35 25mTalk | Beyond Traditional Teaching: Designing a virtual teaching assistant using LLMs for CS educationGlobal Papers DOI |