The number of students learning programming languages in higher education and secondary schools has substantially increased, especially in the last decade. The increasing number of (novice) programmers makes code script assessment more important. Thus, this study proposes a new marking technique based on a semi-automated assessment approach. It advocates providing detailed and consistent feedback for novice programmers based on formative assessment. An experiment was carried out to check the

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... sibility of the proposed marking technique. The initial results and findings show that this is a potentially valuable approach.