  Commonly, introductory programming courses in higher education institutions
have hundreds of participating students eager to learn to program. The manual
effort for reviewing the submitted source code and for providing feedback can
no longer be managed. Manually reviewing the submitted homework can be
subjective and unfair, particularly if many tutors are responsible for grading.
Different autograders can help in this situation; however, there is a lack of
knowledge about how autograders can impact students' overall perception of
programming classes and teaching. This is relevant for course organizers and
institutions to keep their programming courses attractive while coping with
increasing students.
  This paper studies the answers to the standardized university evaluation
questionnaires of multiple large-scale foundational computer science courses
which recently introduced autograding. The differences before and after this
intervention are analyzed. By incorporating additional observations, we
hypothesize how the autograder might have contributed to the significant
changes in the data, such as, improved interactions between tutors and
students, improved overall course quality, improved learning success, increased
time spent, and reduced difficulty. This qualitative study aims to provide
hypotheses for future research to define and conduct quantitative surveys and
data analysis. The autograder technology can be validated as a teaching method
to improve student satisfaction with programming courses.
