THE USE OF REVERSE ENGINEERING TO ANALYZE STUDENT COMPUTER-PROGRAMS

In this paper, an explanatory program understander that can analyse st udent solutions for programming assignments is described, The approach uses a number of reverse engineering techniques and is grounded on a cognitive model of procedural programming knowledge. It will be shown that, through the use of reverse engineering techniques, a lot of feed back (e.g. on errors) can be generated without having to use any prior knowledge on what the program is supposed to do. When such informatio n is available, problem-specific feedback can also be generated. Furth ermore, the use of the cognitive programming concepts allows one to sp ecify the errors in an understandable way using exactly the same words and concepts as human programmers. This opens interesting possibiliti es for other uses of the proposed program understanding technique desc ribed in this article.