Piloting e-Assessment of Diagrammatic Coursework, CIF 2008/09 Project Completion Report

Abstract

This project deals with improving undergraduate assessment by using automated marking fordiagrammatic coursework. Automated marking of diagrammatic coursework (e-Assessment),offers many potential benefits including timely feedback, consistency of marking and freeing up of valuable lecturer time. Unfortunately, until recently, e-Assessment of diagrams has proved too challenging because of imprecise semantics, the need to make sense of incomplete or only partially correct solutions and the possibility of a multiplicity of correct solutions. Yet, the use of diagrams is quite commonplace in many disciplines such as Computer Science,Engineering and Design. This research is important because quality and timeliness of feedback is an area about which the students have been consistently critical, so e-Assessment represents a very real opportunity to improve the Brunel student experience.As part of this project we have developed a software tool for automated marking of diagrammatic coursework and evaluated it on a second year undergraduate module at the Brunel University. This software is customizable, plug and play and extensible. The evaluation results show that the software is effective but further work is required to perfect the accuracy.The software tool and corpus of coursework are published in sourceforge under the project 'e-Assessment of Diagrammatic Coursework'. The link for this project is as follows.https://sourceforge.net/projects/eassessmentofd/files/.