Assessment in education allows for obtaining, organizing, and presenting information about how much and how well the student is learning. The current paper aims at analysing and discussing some of the most state-of-the-art assessment systems in education. Later, this work presents a specific use case developed for the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, which is an online university. An automatic evaluation tool is proposed that allows the student to evaluate himself anytime and receive instant feedback. This tool is a web-based platform, and it has been designed for engineering subjects (i.e., with math symbols and formulas) in Catalan and Spanish. Particularly, the technique used for automatic assessment is latent semantic analysis. Although the experimental framework from the use case is quite challenging, results are promising.

The authors would like to thank the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya for providing us /nthe materials and the context needed to develop the current research, and for partially /nfunding this work under the Teaching Innovation Project number IN-PID 1043. We /nwould like to specially thank Germán Cobo, David García, Jordi Duran, Francisco /nCortés, Lluis Villarejo, and Rafa el E. Banchs for their support to this work. This work /nhas also been partially funded by the Seventh Framework Program of the European /nCommission through the International Outgoing Fellowship Marie Curie Action /n(IMTraP-2011-29951).