Development of an online exam platform for the programming language course: Ontology-based approach

As the programming competence has become one of the most fundamental skills for civil engineers, undergraduate students in many universities and colleges are now required to take a programming language course such as C++ or Java. Researchers have pointed out that the best way to expedite the learning process for students taking the programming language course is to ask them to write codes by themselves. However, plagiarism always exists among students' source codes and the course instructor does not have an effective means to verify whether a student truly understand the programming concepts or not. Use of the ontology for the programming language concepts may help resolve the above problem. In fact, the interaction between the instructor and the students is a knowledge exchange process. In the Web Ontology Language (OWL) definition, the ontology consists of three components: individuals, properties, and classes. The relationships of these components and the characteristics of properties make the ontology be able to represent complicated concepts. The ontology also includes a reasoning mechanism which can automatically verify the rationality and consistency of the model and do the classification. This study constructs an ontology model to capture the concepts of the C++ programming language. With the ontology model, similar concepts of the programming language could be combined together by the OWL reasoner to generate a new question. This model can assist in creating an online exam platform that can contain a large number of question templates and generate a question dynamically. Preventing plagiarism can also be achieved by generating a unique set of questions for each student, i.e., changing the parameters or other status of a question. The instructor can concentrate more on the learning process of a student, while students' real learning performances can be evaluated by using this online exam platform.