"Why is my code slow?" Efficiency Bugs in Student Code
Name
3641554.3701939.pdf
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946.24 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
55f4a0ad06d6c6a08ba1e81a9e8656ba
Author(s)
Dargan, Hope
Gilbert-Diamond, Adam
Hartz, Adam
Miller, Robert
Date Issued
February 12, 2025
Publisher
ACM|Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1
Citation
Dargan, Hope, Gilbert-Diamond, Adam, Hartz, Adam and Miller, Robert. 2025. ""Why is my code slow?" Efficiency Bugs in Student Code."
Version
Final published version
Abstract
While prior research has categorized common errors and code quality issues of student programmers, little attention has been paid to researching student efficiency bugs. Qualitative content analysis of 250 slow student submissions across five CS2 assignments yielded over 750 efficiency bugs. Extracting general themes resulted in an efficiency bug taxonomy with three main categories: superfluous computation, suboptimal data structure design, and suboptimal algorithm design, with 12 subcategories. Analysis of specific bug frequencies across the assignments provided insights that may inform content design for programming courses.
Description
SIGCSE TS 2025, February 26-March 1, 2025, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3641554.3701939
