Automatic website assignment marking system

Software	Java or C++ or Smalltalk or another object oriented language
Covers	Programming, processing text files using rules and regular expressions
Skills Required	Programming, good knowledge of HTML and CSS
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ??? Programming ????

Brief Description

Large numbers of students learn HTML and CSS and produce websites as assignments, that then need to get marked. In the Faculty of Technology at De Montfort University, and elsewhere, we want to assess the students' knowledge and technical competence with HTML and CSS, and their ability to use a variety of techniques and conform to good programming standards, as well as their ability to produce good looking pages. Looking hard at the technical details of what exactly the students have done and how they have done it is quite time-consuming, even with very efficient streamlined procedures, and teaching staff at DMU and elsewhere are under increasing pressure to do very large amounts of marking very quickly.

The aim of this project is to produce a system that automates as much of the process of marking HTML/CSS assignments as possible. A lot of the checking of technical details that we do when giving websites a very thorough look could be handled by a sufficiently clever program, that would present a report and maybe a set of marks, that the tutor could read. This might save the tutor the trouble of looking for all the technical details while bringing the tutor's attention to features that actually need a look. Such a system might also be a valuable resource for students trying to learn to use HTML and CSS well and train themselves into good programming habits, and get high marks.

Variants

The approach taken to the project will depend on two decisions: (1) How much to try to make use of the range of existing plugins and tools for processing HTML and CSS files, for instance to remove redundant or unused CSS rules; and how much to implement from scratch. (2) How much to focus on identifying good and bad features of HTML and CSS files and generating marks, versus presenting information that a human marker can use to track down features of the website to give marks for or look more closely at.

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