Automated Assessment of Multi-Step Answers for Mathematical Word Problems

Abstract

We present a system to automatically grade the mathematical word questions. The questions that we currently consider are at the level of GCE (General Certificate of Education) Ordinary Level (O/L) Mathematics paper standard in Sri Lanka. The solutions to these questions are open-ended multi step answers. The system uses a regular expression based information retrieval approach to validate the expressions in the answers. The implemented system properly evaluates student answers using a marking rubric and awards full/partial marks. We have tested the performance of the system using 500 answer scripts for five different questions from 50 students. The grades given by the system are compared against the manual grading marks and only one answer was graded wrongly. Therefore the accuracy of the system is 99.8%.