Can ChatGPT Play the Role of a Teaching Assistant in an Introductory Programming Course?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential of ChatGPT to serve as a virtual Teaching Assistant in an introductory programming course by evaluating its grading and feedback capabilities compared to human TAs.

Contribution

It provides an empirical assessment of ChatGPT's effectiveness in grading and providing feedback, highlighting its potential role in computing education.

Findings

ChatGPT's grading performance is comparable to human TAs.

ChatGPT provides relevant and constructive feedback on student code.

Implications for integrating LLMs into educational workflows.

Abstract

The emergence of Large language models (LLMs) is expected to have a major impact on education. This paper explores the potential of using ChatGPT, an LLM, as a virtual Teaching Assistant (TA) in an Introductory Programming Course. We evaluate ChatGPT's capabilities by comparing its performance with that of human TAs in some of the important TA functions. The TA functions which we focus on include (1) grading student code submissions, and (2) providing feedback to undergraduate students in an introductory programming course. Firstly, we assess ChatGPT's proficiency in grading student code submissions using a given grading rubric and compare its performance with the grades assigned by human TAs. Secondly, we analyze the quality and relevance of the feedback provided by ChatGPT. This evaluation considers how well ChatGPT addresses mistakes and offers suggestions for improvement in student solutions from both code correctness and code quality perspectives. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of integrating ChatGPT into computing education for automated grading, personalized learning experiences, and instructional support.