Introductory Programming Exams and Their Benchmarking in Slovakia

This paper informs about an international initiative of benchmarking introductory programming courses within various higher education institutions. It is based on comparisons of student performance in the final examinations of these courses through the use of a small set of identical programming questions (in a version for a specific programming language that is used in a given course). We report some preliminary results from our research within two universities in Slovakia. We have analyzed our data from three previous academic years within introductory programming courses taught in the C programming language.