My leisure interests

Martial arts Heritage railways Garden railways Motorcycles DIY

Downloads

Linux downloads Windows downloads Java downloads Perl downloads Home automation downloads

About me

Home & family My CV

Site info

Contact the author Download policy Keyword index

Web-based assessment of students

Last modified: Fri Aug 3 09:12:51 2007

Although the use of Web browsers for assessment and self-assessment is no longer new technology, my `QUASI' (`a Question-Answer System for the Internet') system was, I believe, the first such system to be developed and put into routine use (at least in the UK). I also investigated web-based systems for student coursework submission when such ideas were still novel (see my computing publications section for more details). There are now commercial products for Web-based assessment, but QUASI continues to outperform them in a number of areas. Specifically, QUASI incorporates a novel form of `confidence scoring', in which the student learns to distinguish guesses from real knowledge. It also allows free-form answers, and can be configured to distinguish complex input patterns.

QUASI is a general-purpose computer-aided assessment and self-assessment system. It enables a non-specialist tutor to design sets of questions that will be presented to a student by the medium of a Web browser. Students answer the questions, and receive feedback and a score. Exercises can be set by Web browser forms, or by writing text files in a well-documented format. QUASI supports multiple choice, true-false and `click the image' questions, as well as free-form text entry. It incorporate a pattern-matching strategy to classify free-form answers according to templates supplied by the tutor.

Although it was useful in its day, and QUASI is still in use in a number of institutions, I consider it effectively to be obsolete. I am now interested in more sophisticated methods of computer-aided learning, including the use of conversational agents for automated tutorials.

Shameless plug

By the author of this site. Buy on-line from Amazon USA | UK

Editorial

So you want to be a university lecturer? Read this first! Speak like your boss: new developments in managerese

Computing features

File handling in the Linux kernel: an in-depth look at how Linux handles files, filesystems, and file I/O All sorts of Linux stuff Confused about CLASSPATH? answers are here First steps in EJB using jBoss (recently revised for jBoss 3.2)