Automated Assessment Tools (AATs) have been used in undergraduate CS education for decades. TA-Bot, a modular AAT, has existed in some form for 25 years serving thousands of students across multiple universities. Class sizes throughout the last decade have continued to grow, while the number of instructors remains stagnant. AATs help instructors mitigate issues without additional resources, while simultaneously providing students with helpful feedback. The research team implemented novel features into the new, web-based TA-Bot such as dynamic rate limiting between submissions, custom code style feedback, and a gamified points system. The experiment discussed in this paper used TA-Bot over the course of three semesters involving 145 students in CS1. During the first semester, student and instructor feedback was collected on how to improve the tool. The second semester was used to rate limit submissions using a new dynamic rate limiting system. Finally, the third semester of TA-Bot was used as a control group with simple submission input/output checking. Instructors found that TA-Bot helped mitigate issues with continual increases in class sizes. When using TA-Bot with a dynamic rate limit, students were more inclined to start their assignment earlier. In addition to this, TA-Bot provides students with the ability to compare their solution against test cases, while simultaneously providing code-style advice using curated novice-friendly examples.

Governments provide critical services to the residents they serve such as voting information, taxes, and health services. In turn, residents must trust information coming from their governments is legitimate. This paper examines the adoption of three DNS records, Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), and Certificate Authority Authorization (CAA), with governments in the United States. All three DNS records help establish legitimacy in a server’s identity. From February to July 2023, SPF, DMARC, and CAA records from domains belonging to governments in the U.S. were collected, parsed, and semantically analyzed for security misconfigurations. We have developed an open source parser and analyzer to verify the syntax and security configuration of SPF and DMARC records. We found that adoption of all three records is slowly increasing, however errors and misconfigurations are disproportionately found in local, county, and state government domains.

Automated Assessment Tools (AATs) have been used in undergraduate CS education for decades at many universities. TA-Bot, a modular AAT, has existed in some form for 25 years serving thousands of students across multiple universities. Previous research has shown that the earlier students start assignments, the better scores they receive. TA-Bot implements a novel dynamic rate limiting system to incentivize earlier student submissions. As the assignment deadline approaches, the cooldown from when a student submits to when they can make their next submission increases. Thus, students who start earlier are given more opportunities for automated feedback than a student who started closer to the deadline. The experiment discussed used TA-Bot over two semesters involving 144 students in CS1. When the dynamic rate limiting was enabled, students tended to start assignments earlier.