Objectives: Assessments play a crucial role in computer science courses by providing insights into student learning. While previous research has explored various aspects of assessments, little attention has been given to assessment policies that instructors devise and their impact on students’ experiences. Our goal was to investigate: How do assessment policies shape marginalized students’ experiences in coding classes?Method: We conducted 19 semi-structured interviews with post-secondary students currently enrolled in or completed a class where their code was evaluated. To recruit, we primarily targeted students from underrepresented racial groups in computer science. Many of these students attended large 4-year public universities. During the interviews, we inquired about students’ experience with different assessment policies and how those policies affected their lives and experiences completing the assignments. Results: Our findings revealed ten distinct ways policy and students’ lives interacted to create or heighten inequities, which significantly shaped marginalized students’ lives. Many policies did not consider the unique experiences of their students and students’ needs. Additionally, due to unclear and strict policies, students experienced frustration, confusion, and demotivation, consequently diminishing their sense of belonging in computer science and weakening their self-efficacy as programmers. This reveals the negative consequences of poor assessment policy choices and provides insight into how assessment policies can create barriers to learning computer science for marginalized students.

For computing to serve humanity, all individuals must be able to feel safe within computing. While prior work has surfaced how hegemonic racial and gendered expectations manifest in computing, neurodivergent identities have received far less attention. Existing neurodiversity narratives look to deconstruct mechanisms that privilege certain ways of thinking and being over others, but those narratives are scarce within computing. Critically, narratives are constructed in dialogue with community, and prior SIGCSE conferences have largely lacked official support for this construction, relegating those conversations to corners and edges within the conference space. This BoF continues work from last SIGCSE in supporting the construction of narratives that center neurodivergent identities and creating neurodivergent communities. We have three goals for this space: 1) cultivate community around an "invisible" identity for which public disclosure is often problematic, 2) give an explicit space for folks to "unmask" within a broader conference where masking is typically expected, and 3) utilize existing work to create connections around more specific aspects of neurodivergence.

This Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session will offer LGBTQ+ researchers and practitioners at SIGCSE TS a space for networking, sharing experiences, and being in community together. Given the consistent marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community, this BOF aims to create a community at SIGCSE of professors, students, researchers, and practitioners with interest in computing education. The BOF will provide a space for people to decompress from the long conference day through playing board games and socializing. There is also space for attendees to discuss ways computing education and SIGCSE could be more inclusive to the LGBTQ+ community.

For computing to serve humanity, all individuals must be able to feel safe within computing. While prior work has surfaced how hegemonic racial and gendered expectations manifest in computing, neurodivergent identities have received far less attention. Existing neurodiversity narratives look to deconstruct mechanisms that privilege certain ways of thinking and being over others, but those narratives are scarce within computing. Critically, narratives are constructed in dialogue among community, and prior SIGCSE conferences have not offered explicit space for this construction, relegating those conversations to corners and edges within the conference space. This BoF aims to support the construction of narratives that center neurodivergent identities and support neurodivergent communities. I have three goals for this space: 1) cultivate community around an "invisible'' identity for which public disclosure is often problematic, 2) give an explicit space for folks to "unmask'' within a broader conference where some degree of masking is expected, and 3) utilize existing work to create connections around more specific aspects of neurodivergence.

Social upheaval through widespread disinformation, aggressive automation, and algorithmic oppression have led to an increasing focus on the ethical considerations of technologists. In response, researchers and educators have looked to integrate ethics into Computer Science curricula, either by creating ethics-exclusive courses or embedding ethics into existing computing topics. Regardless of approach, few ethics integrations seek to explicitly center counternarratives, narratives opposing dominant narratives within computing, as a method of instruction. Given an existing teaching opportunity, our prior experience with computer systems education, and a lack of existing ethics integrations into computer systems, we integrated counternarratives into an introductory systems course. We framed this integration through theHouse of Computing (HoC), a structural metaphor that frames the computing discipline as an object for critique. Throughout the course, we presented counternarratives alongside technical content. We assessed student understanding of counternarratives through "floorplans'': metaphorical representations of course units, or floors within theHoC. Through an analysis of students' first floorplan, we found that nearly every student expressed existing or newfound awareness of structural problems within computing, though the novelty of the floorplans concept challenged students. Based on this experience, we offer recommendations for instructors looking to teach computer systems critically or integrate counternarratives into other computing courses.