Effective use of rubrics in computer assisted subjective answer-script evaluation

Abstract

Evaluation of student examination answer-scripts and result compilation are two laborious but crucial post examination tasks. In the manual process of evaluation and result compilation, errors in marking, tabulation, recording, calculation coupled with the impact of Examiner subjectivity or Examiner variability, are very common. Most of the currently used methods partially address these problems by employing additional human resources and time. There is a need to adopt a unified approach that would ensure uniformity within and across examiners and deal with errors associated with evaluation and result compilation more effectively. This paper presents a pragmatic and experientially developed computer assisted evaluation of subjective answer scripts using rubrics. The proposed approach focuses on improving the evaluation and result compilation tasks by reducing/eliminating the errors and examiner variability to re-align the examination system from highly error prone to extremely robust and reliable stream. Evaluation of student examination answer-scripts and result compilation are two laborious but crucial post examination tasks. In the manual process of evaluation and result compilation, errors in marking, tabulation, recording, calculation coupled with the impact of Examiner subjectivity or Examiner variability, are very common. Most of the currently used methods partially address these problems by employing additional human resources and time. There is a need to adopt a unified approach that would ensure uniformity within and across examiners and deal with errors associated with evaluation and result compilation more effectively. This paper presents a pragmatic and experientially developed computer assisted evaluation of subjective answer scripts using rubrics. The proposed approach focuses on improving the evaluation and result compilation tasks by reducing/eliminating the errors and examiner variability to re-align the examination system from highly error prone to extremely robust and reliable stream.