A Proposal for a Standard Evaluation Method for Assessing Programming Proficiency in Assembly Language

It is common knowledge that assembly language programming is a skill that students consider to be “hard to learn”. Nonetheless, it is vastly required in several knowledge areas in engineering and technology. Several research efforts have addressed different methodologies for teaching assembly language to college students. While some provide interesting approaches to presenting the concepts, the studies still need a formal evaluation to discern if the proposal is objectively better at teaching than conventional classroom approaches. In assessing different methodologies for teaching assembly, we found the task to be more complex than expected, as we could not find a standard test that measures the ability of assembly programming. A written exam or evaluation could be used to measure proficiency in programming, but the efficacy of that test to evaluate real programming skills is a question to be answered. With this research, we would like to propose a design methodology for assessing programming skills in assembly language. Furthermore, we hope that this methodology can be used to create tests that can evaluate the programming skill in assembly language and could be used for testing the effectiveness of different teaching methods.