Identifying Student Profiles Within Online Judge Systems Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence
It addresses the problem of providing additional feedback for students and instructors in programming education, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like multi-instance learning.
This work tackled the limitation of insufficient feedback in Online Judge systems by using learning-based schemes and explainable AI to model student behavior and automatically infer feedback, achieving significant prediction of user outcomes based on behavioral patterns from 2500 submissions.
Online Judge (OJ) systems are typically considered within programming-related courses as they yield fast and objective assessments of the code developed by the students. Such an evaluation generally provides a single decision based on a rubric, most commonly whether the submission successfully accomplished the assignment. Nevertheless, since in an educational context such information may be deemed insufficient, it would be beneficial for both the student and the instructor to receive additional feedback about the overall development of the task. This work aims to tackle this limitation by considering the further exploitation of the information gathered by the OJ and automatically inferring feedback for both the student and the instructor. More precisely, we consider the use of learning-based schemes -- particularly, multi-instance learning (MIL) and classical machine learning formulations -- to model student behavior. Besides, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is contemplated to provide human-understandable feedback. The proposal has been evaluated considering a case of study comprising 2500 submissions from roughly 90 different students from a programming-related course in a computer science degree. The results obtained validate the proposal: The model is capable of significantly predicting the user outcome (either passing or failing the assignment) solely based on the behavioral pattern inferred by the submissions provided to the OJ. Moreover, the proposal is able to identify prone-to-fail student groups and profiles as well as other relevant information, which eventually serves as feedback to both the student and the instructor.