State Polytechnic of Malang (POLINEMA), Indonesia, offers the basic Java programming course to first-year students for teaching core concepts such as variables, control structures, loops, and functions. This course is essential for developing their foundational coding skills clearly understanding syntax and object-oriented features. However, students often struggle in choosing correct code structures and behaviours, while teachers have to spend long time to mark the submitted codes from them. Previously, we have introduced a test-driven development approach to Java programming assignments. Test codes become code templates providing the automatic marking capability, while allowing automatically marking students’ codes. In this study, we present its implementation in POLINEMA and discuss the effectiveness. The application result to 31 students in 16 assignments shows high student pass-rate percentages of 98–100% and a substantial reduction in teachers’ marking efforts from 41–82 hours by previous ways to under 9 minutes by the new approach.