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CourseMaster / Ceilidh

While [13] is the most commonly cited early work in the area of CAA, CourseMaster (formerly Ceilidh) is certainly the most commonly used and most commonly cited CAA tool for grading programming work. In [16], Higgins, Symeonidis, and Tsintsifas describe the grading system embodied in CourseMaster. The system that they present is both vast and yet narrow in design. It covers a large number of the functional requirements that have already been noted in this historical review, but there is no discussion of the human components that intuitively seem like an integral part of the evaluation and assessment process. CourseMaster appears to only support statically-checkable properties, and doesn't seem to explicitly have support for grader-override of marking. CourseMaster requires Java familiarity on the part of the grader. In these ways, while CourseMaster sounds like an amazing development, the published description implies that the system is forcing the user to conform to the system paradigm, rather than enhancing existing paradigms of usage.


next up previous contents
Next: Design of Agar Up: History of Computer-Aided Assessment Previous: Fully Automated Assessment   Contents
Titus Winters 2005-02-17