A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

294 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
Systems to assist in the administration of courses, assignment marking and resource
management all have a part to play in increasing the leverage of the human resource
investment. At Warwick, a system has been developed facilitating online assessment
methods to address the pressing problems associated with the management and
assessment of large student numbers. The BOSS system, explored in Case study 3,
provides students with ‘instant’ detailed feedback on their submitted coursework while
enabling staff to monitor the students, automate assessment of their work, and generate
reports about plagiarism possibilities. Using BOSS, students are able to complete more
coursework with more efficient feedback.
Case study 3: Managing the assessment of large groups
Automated tools for the submission and assessment of programming
assignments have been developed in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Warwick since 1994. The original motivation was the need to
streamline the process of marking assignments, ensure accuracy and facilitate
timely feedback.
Known as BOSS (The BOSS Online Submission System), the package began as a
UNIX text-based utility, targeted specifically at two large Pascal programming
modules. Since then, it has developed into a large platform-independent
networked tool, and is used in over a dozen modules delivered by the Department
of Computer Science and other academic departments. Modules include
introductory programming (Pascal, Java, SML, C, UNIX Shell) and advanced
software modules (Software Engineering, Concurrent Programming), with class
sizes up to 300.
BOSS allows any piece of work stored on a computer to be submitted online. A
student’s identity is verified against data held on the university’s student
database, and an electronic receipt for the assignment is returned to the student
as an e-mail. Security measures are employed, such as the inclusion in each receipt
of a hash code (which can be thought of as a digital signature) for each file
submitted, in order to ensure the integrity of submitted work should a student
later claim the system had corrupted his or her files.
If an assignment is a computer program, or is suitable for running automatic
checks (for example, a style analyser in the case of an essay), then BOSS will run
automatic tests in a secure environment, to prevent overenthusiastic students
from accidentally or deliberately corrupting system data. Tests can be made
available to students prior to submission in order for them to check that their
assignment meets the criteria set. One or more markers are given access to an
intuitive interface to allocate marks to various marking categories (including, but
not restricted to, the automatic tests) set by the module leader, who subsequently