Comunicació presentada a: 6th ICTATLL, celebrat a Kyoto, Japó, del 21-23 de setembre de 2010

The UOC is an online university where students follow an online continuous assessment system in order to successfully complete their studies. Due to the growing number of students, the task of marking their assessment tests has become tedious and time-consuming. In order to speed up and standardise the task, the UOC started to develop a pre-evaluation system to provide a preliminary, automatic evaluation of the tests by using the latent semantic analysis technique. Given a set of ideal reference answers for the evaluation tests, the students’ answers are evaluated with respect to the reference, providing an estimated score. This paper shows some preliminar results, from which we can conclude that the correlation between automatic and human evaluations is higher and statistically significant when both the math formulas codification and the language used by the students are the same than in the reference answers.

This work has been partially funded by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya under the Teaching Innovation Project number IN-PID1043 and by the Spanish Department of Education and Science through the Juan de la Cierva fellowship program and the BUCEADOR project number TEC2009-14094-C04-01. The authors also want to thank the Barcelona Media Innovation Centre for its support and permission to publish this research.