In recent years, the idea of technical debt is gaining adoption to describe the problem introduced - more or less consciously - by imperfections in code in an attempt to reduce time and costs of software development. The goal of this thesis is to investigate whether technical debt, a concept usually applied to large industrial software, can be applied to the software developed by students in their programming assignments. The idea could be useful both for students and for teachers. Students could find the aid of an automated analysis of their programs helpful to understand which topics they still have not understood completely and what mistakes or oversights they incurred during their preparation.