Open Access

Ganesamanian Kolappan

• This thesis investigates the benefit of rubrics for grading short answers using an active learning mechanism. Automating short answer grading using Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the active research areas in the education domain. This could save time for the evaluator and invest more time in preparing for the lecture. Most of the research on short answer grading was treated as a similarity task between reference and student answers. However, grading based on reference answers does not account for partial grades and does not provide feedback. Also, the grading is automatic that tries to replace the evaluator. Hence, using rubrics for short answer grading with active learning eliminates the drawbacks mentioned earlier. Initially, the proposed approach is evaluated on the Mohler dataset, popularly used to benchmark the methodology. This phase is used to determine the parameters for the proposed approach. Therefore, the approach with the selected parameter exceeds the performance of current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) methods resulting in the Pearson correlation value of 0.63 and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.85. The proposed approach has surpassed the SOTA methods by almost 4%. Finally, the benchmarked approach is used to grade the short answer based on rubrics instead of reference answers. The proposed approach evaluates short answers from Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) dataset to provide scores and feedback (formative assessment) based on the rubrics. The average performance of the dataset results in the Pearson correlation value of 0.61 and RMSE of 0.83. Thus, this research has proven that rubrics-based grading achieves formative assessment without compromising performance. In addition, the rubrics have the advantage of generalizability to all answers.