Real-Time Automated Answer Scoring

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time automated answer scoring system that preprocesses student responses, evaluates them automatically, and captures progress snapshots to analyze student thinking patterns, aiming to improve educational assessment efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel real-time system for automated answer scoring that also tracks student progress and thought processes during response development.

Findings

Automated scoring reduces evaluation effort and cost.

System captures student progress snapshots for trend analysis.

Enhances understanding of student reasoning during answer formulation.

Abstract

In recent years, the role of big data analytics has exponentially grown and is now slowly making its way into the education industry. Several attempts are being made in this sphere in order to improve the quality of education being provided to students and while many collaborations have been carried out before, automated scoring of answers has been explored to a rather limited extent. One of the biggest hurdles to choosing constructed-response assessments over multiple-choice assessments is the effort and large cost that comes with their evaluation and this is precisely the issue that this project aims to solve. The aim is to accept raw-input from the student in the form of their answer, preprocess the answer, and automatically score the answer. In addition, we have made this a real-time system that captures "snapshots" of the writer's progress with respect to the answer, allowing us to unearth trends with respect to the way a student thinks, and how the student has arrived at their final answer.