Analysis of C Programming Performance: A correlational study of novice programmers’ compiler error logs

Computer programming is now one of the most critical competencies taught in computer courses. [1]. Students require any assistance they can get when learning programming in order to acquire the necessary abilities to excel in the field of computing [2]. This paper aims to investigate the C compiler error logs of Computer Science freshmen students. A prototype was developed and pilot-tested to obtain C source code snippets focusing on assignment statements. The dataset consisting of 1013 logs were extracted from the initial prototype then followed the data science approach of [3] for pre-processing. A Person correlational analysis was conducted on eight features to investigate the relationship between all variables in the dataset. Results of the study show that there is a strong relationship between wrong expression and operator (0.806), wrong expression and numeric value (0.794), operator and numeric value (0.663). Implications of this study is also helpful to computing instructors to improvise the delivery of their teaching pedagogy.