Title

Will Johnny/Joanie Make a Good Software Engineer?: Are Course Grades Showing the Whole Picture?

Author Info

Jane Huffman Hayes, University of Kentucky
Alex Dekhtyar, University of KentuckyFollow
Ashlee Holbrook, University of Kentucky
Olga Dekhtyar, University of Kentucky
Senthil Sundaram, University of Kentucky

Recommended Citation

Published in 19th Conference on Software Engieering Education and Training Proceedings: Hawaii, April 1, 2006, pages 175-184.

NOTE: At the time of publication, the author Alex Dekhtyar was not yet affiliated with Cal Poly.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1109/CSEET.2006.42.

Abstract

Predicting future success of students as software engineers is an open research area. We posit that current grading means do not capture all the information that may predict whether students will become good software engineers. We use one such piece of information, traceability of project artifacts, to illustrate our argument. Traceability has been shown to be an indicator of software project quality in industry. We present the results of a case study of a University of Waterloo graduate-level software engineering course where traceability was examined as well as course grades (such as mid-term, project grade, etc.). We found no correlation between the presence of good traceability and any of the course grades, lending support to our argument.

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Copyright

2006 IEEE.

Publisher statement

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