Computer assisted evaluation using rubrics for reduction of errors and inter and intra examiner heterogeneity

Abstract

Educational institutions worldwide conduct summative examinations to evaluate academic performance of students. Such summative examinations are normally subjective in nature in higher education institutions and needs manual evaluation. However, the manual evaluation of subjective answer-scripts often suffers from evaluation anomalies and the impact of 'Examiner variability' or 'Examiner subjectivity'. Examiner variability mainly occurs due to differences in perception and expectation of each examiner coupled with lapses/errors in evaluation. Most of the currently employed methods partly address the problem of evaluation errors/lapses and examiner subjectivity with the aid of extra checks such as re-checking, re-verification, re-evaluation, etc. We need a pragmatic and unified approach to ensure uniformity and error-free evaluation. In this article, the authors present a method of computer aided evaluation of subjective answer-scripts using rubrics. The proposed approach focuses on improving the evaluation by reducing/eliminating the errors and examiner variability.