The Automated Grading of R Code Snippets: Preliminary Results in a Course of Health Informatics.

Automated grading tools either execute the submitted code against sample data or statically analyse it. The paper presents a tool for the automated grading of R code snippets, submitted by students learning Health Informatics in the degree course of Medicine and Surgery of the University of L’Aquila (Italy). The tool performs a static analysis of the R commands, with the respective output, as well as of the sentences written in natural language. The paper details the problem in general and through examples. Then, it describes the proposed solution and reports on the comparison between the automated grading and the human one. Finally, the paper ends by describing the foreseen use of the tool and the needed improvements.