Dalize van Heerden has been an instructor in the Computer Science Department at The University of South Africa for over 20 years. She teaches many different first, second and third year programming courses, among which is Introduction to Interactive Programming. In this course, she teaches Web Development and JavaScript to almost 700 first-year students.
Before and After CodeGrade: Chaotic to Concise
“The issue we had in previous years was that our systems were not able to handle students’ code efficiently for these amounts of students, so we had students submit their assignments as PDF documents.” Dalize says about the way her assignments were conducted in the past.
Dalize mentions it would have been impossible for students to upload their code, as this grading workflow would be too slow and cumbersome. “I would have to download their zip files, run all their code files separately, mark their work in a separate rubric document, rezip all these files and then send it back to them.” Dalize chose to let students hand in PDF files, but emphasized how much work it still was to grade assignments. “As you can imagine I had these 80 or 90 page documents that I had to scroll through to find the relevant things. I would say it normally took 45 minutes to an hour to grade an assignment because you’re scrolling through a huge document looking for something specific.”
Dalize has now shifted to using CodeGrade to mark her students’ work. At the moment she uses CodeGrade’s rubric and code viewer to manually grade students’ assignments. “Now that I am able to run their code in CodeGrade, I can actually check whether their code works, which is amazing.” She continued. “They submit their files and I can render their code inside CodeGrade. I can simply go through their entire web page, see what works or doesn’t work and then I can start looking at the code and assigning marks using the rubric.”
“With CodeGrade it now takes me about 15 minutes so it has more than halved the time it takes me to mark one assignment and I’m not getting carpal tunnel from scrolling everywhere!” Dalize says about the change CodeGrade has made for her. “Everything is all in one space. So it has made grading a lot simpler.”
Learning about CodeGrade
We asked Dalize how she was introduced to CodeGrade. “I went on to your site and saw what you were doing with your platform and found it quite interesting. So I started chatting with my colleagues about it and we asked for a demo.”
“After the demo I was very impressed. I thought: ‘This is going to make my life easier. This is really going to simplify things for me.’ So we decided to go for it.” She recollects.
