Abstract
One of the most time-consuming activities in higher education is reviewing and grading student evaluations. Rapid and effective feedback of evaluations, along with an appropriate assessment strategy, can significantly improve students’ performance. Furthermore, academic dishonesty is a major issue in higher education that has been aggravated by the limitations derived from the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the possible ways to mitigate this issue is to give different evaluations to each student, with the negative cost of increasing reviewing time. In this work, an open-source system developed in Python to automatically create and correct evaluations is presented. Using Jupyter Notebook as the graphical user interface, the system allows the creation of individual student question sheets, with the same structure and different parameter values, to send them to students, grade them, and send the final score back to the students. The proposed system requires little programming knowledge for the instructors to use it. The system was applied in Civil Engineering and Geological Engineering programs at the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, drastically reducing grading time while improving students’ performance.
Highlights
The assessment of what students have learned during the semester for a particular course is one of the main responsibilities of instructors in higher education
Evaluations are conducted in two stages. Students solve their exams independently with a strict time limit, usually around 120 min. This stage can be done in class or remotely, especially in the last four semesters with the limitations derived from the COVID-19 pandemic, but in both cases, the students are not allowed to receive any external assistance to answer their questions
The assessment system and the reduction in reviewing time associated with it make it possible to increase the number of evaluations during the semester and the realization of a recuperative exam for all students. This type of recuperative exam is usually offered only to students that could not take the exam for medical reasons, but the usage of the system allows it to be offered to all students, as increasing the number of students taking the exam does not translate into additional reviewing time
Summary
The assessment of what students have learned during the semester for a particular course is one of the main responsibilities of instructors in higher education. The main objective of exams, assignments, and projects is to assess students’ progress in the course, an appropriate design of evaluation strategies throughout the course can help students to obtain a functional and meaningful learning experience. The authors state that a total redesign of the exams is needed to replace a face-to-face assessment with a virtual one Based on both the perception of teachers and students, some studies indicate that cheating during an online evaluation is easier [14]. Among the different programming languages used in open-source projects, Python has gained growing interest in the last decade, both in industry and academia It is widely used by researchers in different engineering fields, such as machine learning [30], electronics [31,32], and coastal engineering [33], to name a few.
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