Towards automated assessment of students' preliminary thesis submissions

While a bachelor's or master's thesis is an important document, students often leave their elaboration to the last minute. We established a system of continuous thesis submissions: Students upload their preliminary theses to a learning management system at least six times an academic year. The submissions are assessed for formal criteria like a minimum page count, citation style or inclusion of a particular chapter. In the past, whole evaluation was performed manually, which was a laborious, time-consuming activity. We managed to automate some parts of this process. In this paper, we describe an approach used for automation and lessons learned during application of the system.