Can University Marks Measure Programming Skills for Novice Programmers? An Exploratory Study

Abstract

Programming skills are the key ability of programmers. For novice programmers who are new and have little experience in programming, it is important to measure and improve their programming skills. In practice, novice programmers learn programming knowledge and coding ability at university, and course learning is the main way for novice programmers to improve programming skills. However, can university marks be used to measure the programming skills of programming novices? To answer this question, in a controlled experiment, we compare university marks of novice programmers with their performance in programming tasks. The results showed that there were 7 courses with significant correlation among the 13 courses, among which the software engineering course had the most significant correlation.