What

This is a test of creating an AI marker for first year programming assignments.

The parituclar assignment example is a simple converter that takes in either binary or decimal numbers and converts them to the other.

Why

In later papers using unit testing frameworks and giving out grades based on this can be done sucsessfully as the students are more confident with programming and can handle having to write a program with exact output. However in first year the focus is still on programming itself and so the challenge of the assignment is with the logic of the program and not the exact format of the output (Unless that is part of the logic!).

This would mean that for example the program could output "Converting binary to decimal answer is 10" or "Converting to decimal: 10" and both would be completely acceptable.

How

The goal of the AI marker is to be able to take in a set of test cases and then run the students program against various unit tests however the grading and marking of these unit tests will be done with a LLMs.