This study examines log data from proctored examinations from two classes offered as part of a large online graduate program in computer science. In these two classes, students are permitted to access any internet content during their exams, which themselves have remained largely unchanged over the last several semesters. As a result, when ChatGPT…

Automated essay scoring (AES), where natural language processing is applied to score written text, can underpin educational resources in blended and distance learning. AES performance has typically been reported in terms of correlation coefficients or agreement statistics calculated between a system and an expert human examiner. We describe the…

Online learning has enhanced accessibility in education, but also poses significant challenges in maintaining academic integrity during online exams, particularly when students are prohibited from accessing unauthorized resources through the Internet. Nonetheless, students must remain connected to the Internet in order to take the online exam.…

ALEKS is an adaptive learning and assessment system, with courses covering subjects such as math, chemistry, and statistics. In this work, we focus on the ALEKS math courses, which cover a wide range of content starting at second grade math and continuing through college-level precalculus. To help instructors and students navigate this content,…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) tools aim to improve the efficiency and consistency of essay scoring by using machine learning algorithms. In the existing research work on this topic, most researchers agree that human-automated score agreement remains the benchmark for assessing the accuracy of machine-generated scores. To measure the performance of…

Scoring essays is generally an exhausting and time-consuming task for teachers. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) facilitates the scoring process to be faster and more consistent. The most logical way to assess the performance of an automated scorer is by measuring the score agreement with the human raters. However, we provide empirical evidence that…

Due to the precautionary measures during the COVID-19 pandemic many universities offered unproctored take-home exams. We propose methods to detect potential collusion between students and apply our approach on event log data from take-home exams during the pandemic. We find groups of students with suspiciously similar exams. In addition, we…

Detailed learning objectives foster an effective and equitable learning environment by clarifying what instructors expect students to learn, rather than requiring students to use prior knowledge to infer these expectations. When questions are labeled with relevant learning goals, students understand which skills are tested by those questions.…

Automated scoring of student responses to open-ended questions, including short-answer questions, has great potential to scale to a large number of responses. Recent approaches for automated scoring rely on supervised learning, i.e., training classifiers or fine-tuning language models on a small number of responses with human-provided score…

Access to high-quality education at scale is limited by the difficulty of providing student feedback on open-ended assignments in structured domains like programming, graphics, and short response questions. This problem has proven to be exceptionally difficult: for humans, it requires large amounts of manual work, and for computers, until…

In MOOCs for programming, Automated Testing and Feedback (ATF) systems are frequently integrated, providing learners with immediate feedback on code assignments. The analysis of the large amounts of trace data collected by these systems may provide insights into learners' patterns of utilizing the automated feedback, which is crucial for the…

Teachers often rely on the use of a range of open-ended problems to assess students' understanding of mathematical concepts. Beyond traditional conceptions of student open-ended work, commonly in the form of textual short-answer or essay responses, the use of figures, tables, number lines, graphs, and pictographs are other examples of open-ended…

In Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems, many previous works have studied group fairness using the demographic features of essay writers. However, individual fairness also plays an important role in fair evaluation and has not been yet explored. Initialized by Dwork et al., the fundamental concept of individual fairness is "similar people…

Digitalization and automation of test administration, score reporting, and feedback provision have the potential to benefit large-scale and formative assessments. Many studies on automated essay scoring (AES) and feedback generation systems were published in the last decade, but few connected AES and feedback generation within a unified framework.…

Peer-grading is commonly adopted by instructors as an effective assessment method for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and SPOCs (Small Private online course). For solving the problems brought by varied skill levels and attitudes of online students, statistical models have been proposed to improve the fairness and accuracy of peer-grading.…