Ontology driven framework for assessing the syllabus fairness of a question paper

Examination, being the lone measure of competence in the current education system of our country, has a decisive role in building student's career. Hence, utmost care has to be taken in framing the Question paper (QP). However, setting up a good QP for assessment is a challenging task. Fairness, accuracy, consistency and elimination of bias are very important while selecting questions. In this paper, we address the issue of providing an automated framework to judge the fairness of a QP with respect to a given syllabus. We explored the possibility of using the semantic web technology in general and ontology in particular in addressing the issue of syllabus fairness. We introduce the notion of syllabus ontology that forms the semantically connected network of concepts from the domain. We identify various syllabus fairness issues and proposed an initial model for measuring the syllabus fairness of a QP. Initial results show that the model is feasible.