A Study of Automated Evaluation of Student’s Examination Paper using Machine Learning Techniques

The written exam is a universal tool for evaluating student performance in the field of education. The written exam provides a mechanism by which instructors and organizations ensure the consistency of the assessment process. Human effort required for the assessment is very high and it depends on several factors such as knowledge of the teacher, application level understanding of the teacher, criteria of the marking and time allotted. However, traditional evaluation processes consume very costly efforts and take huge time for the completion of the complete evaluation, verification and publishing of the result process. This research introduces the design and implementation of Handwritten Answer Evaluation (HAES) system for student exam papers. The HAES is an automatic response assessment system that enables the identification of text in answer sheets and can evaluate the grade of each answer based on the previous knowledge of the model. In this study, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool is used to extract the text from human written scanned answer script and machine learning/natural language processing (NLP) techniques are used for grading the answer sheets. The scores are based on cosine set similarity measures, where each sentence in the evaluated answer paper carries their corresponding mark. The developed model can be used to evaluate the marks of the unscored descriptive answers.