---
# System prepended metadata

title: 'Data Science and AI Education local interest group at UoL: 2nd meeting notes'
tags: [2nd meeting, Data Science and AI Education UoL]

---

Data Science and AI Education local interest group at UoL: 2nd meeting notes
===

###### tags: `2nd meeting` `Data Science and AI Education UoL`

:::info
- **Call time and day**:  Thursday 8th September, 12:00-13:00 (GMT+1)
- **Meeting host**: [Luisa Cutillo](https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/maths/staff/5526/dr-luisa-cutillo) 
- **Meeting facilitator**: [Paul Baxter](https://medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/medicine/staff/117/professor-paul-d-baxter)
- **Call joining link**: [MS teams meeting](https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YmY3NTg5YjUtYzhmMy00OTRmLWI2YjktZDEzODA3M2JkZGI1%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22bdeaeda8-c81d-45ce-863e-5232a535b7cb%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%225059c8a0-43a5-44f0-b487-8ec42fe4bea5%22%7d)
- **Private Github repo**: [DS and AI Education Local Interest Group UoL](https://github.com/luisacutillo78/DS-and-AI-edu-UoL-private)
:::

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# 2nd meeting
## Agenda 

:::success
| Agenda                   | Speaker                    |   Time      | 
| ------------------------ | ------------------------------- | ----------------- |
| Intro and overview       | [Luisa Cutillo](https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/maths/staff/5526/dr-luisa-cutillo)             | 12:00 - 12:05   | Complete
Presentation of the New MS TEAM       | [Luisa Cutillo](https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/maths/staff/5526/dr-luisa-cutillo)   | 12:05 - 12:20   | Complete
Intro to Topic Discussion: How To Assess Coding Assignments      | Everyone | 12:20 - 12:25   | Complete
|Collaborative exercise   | Breakout rooms | 12:25 - 12:50   | Complete
| Reflections, discussions and Q&A | [Luisa Cutillo](https://eps.leeds.ac.uk/maths/staff/5526/dr-luisa-cutillo)    |  12:50 - 13:00  | 
:::



### Collaborative exercise

*up to 25 minutes in breakout groups of 3-5 people*

#### Group 1
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- How do you efficiently assess programming coursework? Please tell us best and worst approaches based on your experience.
    - In the school of computing, we use Gradescope which only assesses the output not         the code or the style of coding.
    - 
    - 
    - 
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- What challanges have you faced with programming assignments and how to address them? 
    - 
    - 
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- How to deal with issues of plegiarism/academic integrity with programming assignments? 
    - Ask the students to explain what is happening in the codes, although this may reduce the chance/scope of automatic grading
    - 
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- Can you share any resources that could be useful for setting and assessing programming assignments (ideally in Minerva)?
    - 
    - 
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- Can you share any authomated assessment examples that worked well for you?
    - 
    - 
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- What would you like this group to discuss in the next meetings?
    - feedback to students, how to give specific and efficient one. Very time consuming.
    - 
    - 




#### Group 2
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

We considered the difference between formative and summative assessment, but mostly concentrated on summative assessment.

- How do you efficiently assess programming coursework? Please tell us best and worst approaches based on your experience.
    - Use of teaching assistants to support marking
    - Design to allow automation (not open ended) - unit testing
    - Peer to peer assessment
        -  This is only possible for formative assessment.
    - Provide non-functioning code that the students have to fix. The fixed code should then pass tests.
- What challanges have you faced with programming assignments and how to address them? 
    - Automating assessment is often hard as:
        - How then do we make subjective judgements on how well something has been done.
        - There can be error carried forward issues (e.g. part b relies on answer to part a)
    - A lot of effort can go into designing automated assessment which is only likely to be worth it for large cohort sizes.
    - Students can sometimes find the work of previous cohorts more easily as these are more often shared e.g. on GitHub.
- How to deal with issues of plagiarism/academic integrity with programming assignments? 
    - Randomised version of data set etc. to different students
    - Timed closed book examinations
    - Jupyter notebook to describe code ensures understanding
    - Use of repository history
    - Viva style assessment
- Can you share any resources that could be useful for setting and assessing programming assignments (ideally in Minerva)?
    - Resource on plagiarism in coding
        - https://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/computing/info/plagiarism.html
    - Java Maven tool is good at checking documentation
      
- Can you share any automated assessment examples that worked well for you?
    - No 
- What would you like this group to discuss in the next meetings?
    - Setting learning objectives in data science courses
    - Marking groupwork
    - Cross faculty teaching / research projects

#### Group 3
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*

- How do you efficiently assess programming coursework? Please tell us best and worst approaches based on your experience.
    - Work in groups (5ish)
    - Short presentation of their work instead of marking code directly
    - Unit tests and student write the functions?
    - Submit or not submit code? Is "pretty" code and good RSE practice something to focus on in teaching?
    - Testing functionality vs the maintainability / cleanness of the code
    - Peer assessment (pass code to your neighbour for comments)
    - Find examples of "bad" code and ask students to find the issues.
- What challanges have you faced with programming assignments and how to address them? 
    - Numbers in large courses 
    - 
    - 
- How to deal with issues of plegiarism/academic integrity with programming assignments? 
    - Change assignment slightly for each group (i.e. different datasets)
    - If code itself isn't part of the submission, but results are, this becomes less of an issue?
    - Peer evaluation?
- Can you share any resources that could be useful for setting and assessing programming assignments (ideally in Minerva)?
    - 
    - Kaggle examples (loading, training, metrics etc)
    - Advent of code
- Can you share any authomated assessment examples that worked well for you?
    - 
    - Find examples of "bad" code and ask students to find the issues. Could be multiple choice
    - 
- What would you like this group to discuss in the next meetings?
    - 
    - Robust testing? Internal / external validation? Overfitting? Pre-registration of analysis plans?
    - 


#### Group 4
*Please use this space to take notes from your breakout group discussion.*



- How do you efficiently assess programming coursework? Please tell us best and worst approaches based on your experience.
    - One of us has taught very simple first-year undergraduate "How to use R"-type material. Programming is tested by checking simple "one number" answers -- marking the answers rather than the code itself. 
    - Different datasets for each student and slightly different tasks (randomised)
    - Worst experiences: Failure of autumated marking - check it works!
    - It is possible to give much quicker (although less detailed)
    - 
- What challanges have you faced with programming assignments and how to address them? 
    - 
    - 
    - 
- How to deal with issues of plagiarism/academic integrity with programming assignments? 
    - For low-stakes assessment (coursework worth a small proportion of the module mark): do almost nothing to combat plagiarism.
    - Random datasets avoids the very most naive copying (but not much more).
    - We thought about how easy it would be to randomise the task -- sounds tricky but maybe doable.
- Can you share any resources that could be useful for setting and assessing programming assignments (ideally in Minerva)?
    - If it's possible to mark simple numerical answers, then a Microsoft Form is sufficient. (It's probably possible to do this natively in Minerva if everyone's answers should be the same.)
    - I've used a MailMerge to return answers and very basic feedback to students by email.
    - 
- Can you share any automated assessment examples that worked well for you?
    - 
    - 
    - 
- What would you like this group to discuss in the next meetings?
    - 
    - 
    - 






## Reflections and Q&A

If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel very free to contribute these below:
- Questions/thoughts:
    
       
- Links:


- Chat: