Abstract—The difficulties of many students in introductory
programming courses and the consequent failure and drop out
make it necessary to look for motivation strategies for them to
be successful. One of the strategies that is touted in the
literature is self-assessment to compromise and motivate
students. As we had doubts about the possibility of this strategy,
we did an experiment and asked the students to predict the
grades of the two tests and the two projects during a semester.
Even knowing the correction grid and exercises that involve
programming languages, which shows the result to the
programmer, we found that the students' forecasts were not
very accurate. In the first test we found that the worst students
said they were going to get reasonable grades and much better
than reality, while the best students thought they had worse
grades than they actually had. The other moments of evaluation
did not have as severe results, but forecasts continued to be
inaccurate. We did tests by gender, by age, for being a freshman
or not, for having taken a computer course in high school and
for previous knowledge of programming languages: none of
these variables proved to be as significant as the students'
grades and their corresponding insecurity-fear or
optimism-unconscious.
Index Terms—CS1, grade predict, introduction to
programming, motivation strategies.
Sónia Rolland Sobral is with REMIT, Universidade Portucalense, Porto,
Portugal (e-mail: sonia@upt.pt).
Cite: Sónia Rolland Sobral, "CS1 Student Grade Prediction: Unconscious Optimism vs Insecurity?," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 11, no. 8, pp. 387-391, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).