UTD students who have taken computer science courses are familiar with the web-based learning website Zybooks. The tool, while facing scrutiny from students, is an indispensable tool in understaffed classrooms that will not be going away anytime soon.
Zybooks is an interactive digital gradebook, but most students know it for its auto-grading section known as Zylabs. Zybooks and its subsection Zylabs are not meant to only be used for assignments; the website also has extra problems to help students practice and can detect errors in one’s code. Zybooks’ products have been used extensively across the U.S., with Zybooks reporting it has provided 1.7 million students across 1,700 institutions with their necessary coursework — including students taking computer science classes at UTD. However, students have grown disgruntled by its regular use in the classroom. Computer engineering sophomore Temiloluwa Ojuma said Zybooks can cause more problems than it provides benefits, especially for complex programming projects.
“Even a small mistake can lead to harsh grading by AI, often requiring students to seek help from the [Computer Science Mentor Center] or attend office hours,” Ojuma said .
Zylabs is designed so that students get an exact output. This can be helpful for seeing the problems with one’s code, but the application struggling to correctly read formatting errors or deviations or handle every possible solution to a program leads students to turn in code late and seek outside help. Teaching assistants, who typically grade papers and assignments in a course instead of the main professor, use Zylabs alongside other grading criteria like attendance and participation to provide students with their grades. Computer science professor Jason Smith said this is easier than hand-grading assignments for what can at times be hundreds of students per class.
“The reason auto-graders are used rather than a TA grader is simply due to lack of resources,” Smith said. “With class sizes expanding, there isn’t enough manpower nor money to pay the TAs and graders for the time it would take to grade things manually.”
Although white-space errors tend to be some of the biggest frustrations regarding the auto-grader, there are solutions hidden from the student’s eyes, such as simply speaking to their professor about the grading.
“The frustrations we hear about Zylabs is often due to the faculty making the grading too strict or students not discovering edge cases in their program on their own,” Smith said. “Things like white space check and capitalization can be turned off. Students experiencing this frustration [should] talk to their professor about it and discuss the possibility of turning off these checks.”
Smith said that professors favor how Zylabs gives students chances to amend their mistakes, while also letting them know which errors are preventing them from reaching full points on an assignment.
“Professors allow multiple submissions for the assignments, so if something doesn’t work, students have the opportunity to correct,” says Smith. “It’s like having the ability to do corrections on an assignment before, rather than after, the grade is calculated.”