Issues of partial credit in mathematical assessment by computer

Abstract

since 1985. From the beginning CALM has featured assessment in its programs (Beevers, Cherry, Foster and McGuire, 1991), and enabled both students and teachers to view progress in formative assessment The computer can play a role in at least four types of assessment: diagnostic, self-test, continuous and grading assessment. The TLTP project Mathwise employs the computer in three of these roles. In 1994 CALM reported on an educational experiment in which the computer was used for the first time to grade, in part, the learning of a large class of service mathematics students (Beevers, McGuire, Stirling and Wild ,1995), using the Mathwise assessment template. At that time the main issues identified were those of 'partial credit' and communication between the student and the computer. These educational points were addressed in the next phase of the CALM Project in which the commercial testing program Interactive PastPapers was developed. The main aim of this paper is to describe how Interactive Past Papers has been able to incorporate some approaches to partial credit which has helped to alleviate student worries on these issues. Background information on other features in Interactive PastPapers is also included to provide context for the discussion.

Towards electronically assisted peer assessment: a case study

“…In our software labs, with answers consisting of program solutions without a highly constrained specification, an automated process cannot even perform a simple test of correctness (Joy and Luck, 1998). To build a system that can provide meaningful feedback about the construction of the program is even harder (Beevers, Youngson, McGuire, Wild, and Fiddes, 1999;Thelwal, 1998). As Joy and Luck have shown (1999), simple measurements about the code, such as the number of comments, can be made but an automated process cannot perceive the more subtle aspects: choice of variable names; elegance of solution; why the code does not give a desired result.…”

A Design Science Research Methodology for Expert Systems Development

“…Computer aided assessment (CAA) for mathematics is limited only to checking a final answer for multistage questions (Livne et al, 2007;Sangwin et al, 2009;Sangwin, 2012;Beevers et al, 1999). The only solution to this problem has been to apply a partial credit method which could award marks for a partially correct portion of the solution, even if the final answer was wrong (Beevers et al, 1999;Lawson, 2012).…”

“…The only solution to this problem has been to apply a partial credit method which could award marks for a partially correct portion of the solution, even if the final answer was wrong (Beevers et al, 1999;Lawson, 2012). Many software packages for mathematical assessment have been developed, with the help of CAA software, to implement the partial credit concept.…”

In Engineering Classes, How to Assign Partial Credit: From Current Subjective Practice to Exact Formulas (Based on Computational Intelligence Ideas)

“…From the pedagogical viewpoint, partial credit is very important: it enables the student who is learning -but who has not yet reached a perfect-knowledge stage -to see his or her progress; see, e.g., [1], [3].…”