2026/07/17 by Yufan Zhang, Jaromir Savelka, Seth Copen Goldstein +1
#cs.SE
The rapid development and popularization of AI-enabled coding agents have meant software engineering students and professionals cannot be assumed to understand their own code, which risks academic integrity and professional accountability. We developed a method called Personalized Probing Puzzles (p3) to evaluate students' understanding of their own code, and tested p3 in a graduate-level cloud computing course. Our pilot study shows that p3 can help identify potential gaps in students' understanding of their own code. The puzzles are automatically generated, asynchronously administered, and finished in minutes. Future work is needed to correlate puzzle results with code understanding and to embed p3 in a professional code review process.