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Student Responses and Comments
Students’ responses were regularly solicited by means of questionnaire surveys conducted at the end of each semester in the first few semesters of PASS deployment. The results had been quite consistent across different semesters as follows.
- The majority (about 80-90%) of the students agreed that PASS had been helpful for their laboratory and weekly practical exercises. Most of them used PASS to check their work about 5 times a week, while one-third did so 10 times or more each week. Almost half of the students requested to have all exercises available in PASS to facilitate their learning.
- About 70-85% of the students reported that PASS did help them to reveal their program bugs.
- For programming assignments, about 40-45% of the students used PASS to test their programs more than 10 times before they submitted their solutions.
- On a scale of 1 to 5 (where 5 represents the best rating), about 60-65% rated PASS a score of 4 or 5.
These statistics were indicative of the generally positive experiences of students with PASS and its popularity. Their written comments, some of which extracted below, confirmed that PASS had been helpful towards their learning, especially for the weaker students.
- “I can work more independently and it gives me confidence when I got all correct. Little by little, I build up my own reliance!”
- “It can help me to check my lab exercises by myself. It can encourage me to do all the lab exercises. So it is very useful.”
- “We can know the bugs immediately; it increases the rate of learning.”
- “Our overall computer program can be improved as checking can be done in the PASS system. I know that the difference between my answer and the expected result.”
- “It can help me to check and compile my program without always ask[ing] for tutor or lecturer.”
- “[PASS] help[s] me to discover logical errors.”
