Incentivizing Good Programming Practices: The Impact of Early Program Submission on Student Course and Exam Performance

Motivating students to engage with a course, encouraging positive behavior, and inspiring them to take an active role in their educational process - particularly at the beginning of the course are universal challenges in education. In this article, we share our experience implementing an early submission incentive policy in a Machine Organization and Assembly Language Programming course. This policy encourages students to complete and submit their weekly lab work early in exchange for bonus points. We examine the impact of this positive behavior reinforcement on overall student performance (final grade) and performance in specific components such as exams and programming assignments. Our results, based on data collected over four years and involving more than 1,400 students, indicate that students who participate in early submissions achieve a higher final grade and perform better on other assessments, such as programming assignments.