A Novel System for Automatic, Configurable and Partial Assessment of Student SQL Queries

At some universities, students are required to write SQL queries to pass database-related courses. When it comes to assessing students’ queries, three options are available: manual assessment (all work is done by teachers), semi-automated assessment (computer system provides parts of the final score, teachers give final mark), and fully-automated assessment (all work is done by a computer system). There are many currently available computer systems that can be used for both semi-automated and fully-automated assessments. While evaluating them, it became clear that their focus was not primarily on providing partial marks for substandard students’ solutions and also not primarily on teachers’ influence on the assessment process. Since these two requirements are very important for some universities, this paper proposes a novel fully-automated assessment system that is focused on satisfying these requirements. The early version of the system is built and evaluated against manual assessments of student work, resulting in the conclusion that the system is indeed very promising. Furthermore, the system discovered some inconsistencies in marks awarded manually by teachers, giving another perspective on the usefulness of the proposed system.