Title: The suitability of similarity measures to the grading of short answers in examination

Authors: Okure U. Obot; Samuel S. Udoh; Kingsley F. Attai

Addresses: University of Uyo, Uyo, Nigeria ' University of Uyo, Uyo, Nigeria ' Ritman University, Ikot Ekpene, Nigeria

Abstract: Grading of short answers in an examination is a tedious exercise that takes so much of examiners' time. Fatigue could set in leading to errors. Sometimes sentiments come into play. The attendant effect of this is variations in the marks awarded to candidates even when they express the same opinion. In this study, Jaccard, Cosine, Jaro and Dice similarity measures were used to grade the answers provided by candidates in examinations of 647 questions. The similarity measures were tested with the aim of ascertaining the measure that rank closest to the average scores provided by three human examiners with the same examinations' answers and marking guides. Results showed that Jaro similarity measure ranked closest to the mean score of the examiners with a variance absolute error of 0.62% and covaried strongly by 97% with a significant level of 0.001.

Keywords: Jaro; Jaccard; Cosine; Dice; examination; short answers; similarity measures; semantics; lexical; natural language processing; NLP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJQRE.2021.119816

International Journal of Quantitative Research in Education, 2021 Vol.5 No.3, pp.207 - 222

Received: 14 Jul 2020
Accepted: 24 Jan 2021
Published online: 21 Dec 2021 *

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