Ontology-Based Approach to Determine the Coverage of Examination Papers

Examinations play an important role in the learning process and the whole education system. It is a way of assessing what the students have learned concerning particular subjects. The strengths and weaknesses of the students can be assessed through the examination. Therefore, examination papers should have a standard and quality attributes. The question preparation process is a very challenging step for academics. Sometimes, academics fail to prepare the question papers to address all the points in the syllabus. It is a critical problem in education when it fails to cover all the learning outcomes. Currently, there is no automated system to check the depth of the examination papers. Checking the depth manually is a very difficult and time-consuming task. In this research, the ontology-based approach is proposed to determine the depth of the examination papers. First, the ontology for a particular subject was created using Protégé software. Then, the soft copies of the examination papers were collected relevant to the subject. Then the stop words of the examination papers were removed. The created ontology was read by Java and Jena library. After that, a list of the subclasses of the ontology had been retrieved. Next, the path of the word was included in the ontology was discovered. In parallel, the number of all concepts in the ontology was counted. Using the paths of the words, the depth of the examination papers was evaluated. The average of 84.81% is shown by the ontology based approach and 79.99% was provided by the experts as the coverage for 5 subjects we analyzed. The empirical study of our prototyping system has proved the effectiveness of our proposed ontology-based method.