Assessment of Students in Databases by Audit Trails

Abstract

Assessing students' answers is a very timeconsuming activity in an examination and that makes teachers reduce the time they can devote to other duties. Testing and grading database skills automatically can dramatically reduce teachers' time taken in routine tasks. Data collected in computer logs can record every action that the student performs in a computer-based learning environment. These log actions can be utilized to provide insight into the student's performance. Database management systems include an audit trail component which involves setting up auditing to record user activities. Audit trail records can be studied to find pattern and behaviors of students while they are appearing in a practical test for databases. This paper attempt was made to investigate whether the audit trail records generated by students in practical examination for databases could be related to the marks they secured in the exam. The collected data was statistically analyzed to find any correlation between the number of records in the audit trials generated per student and his grades secured. The grades secured by the student indicated significant dependence on the number of audit trails records.