Fuzzy descriptive evaluation system: real, complete and fair evaluation of students

Abstract

In recent years, descriptive evaluation has been introduced as a new model for educational evaluation of Iranian students. The current descriptive evaluation method is based on four-valued logic. Assessing all students with only four values is led to a lack of relative justice and creation of unrealistic equality. Also, the complexity of the evaluation process in the current method increases teacher error’s likelihood. As a suitable solution, in this paper, a fuzzy descriptive evaluation system has been proposed. The proposed method is based on fuzzy logic, which is an infinite-valued logic, and it can perform approximate reasoning on natural language propositions. By the proposed fuzzy system, student assessment is performed over the school year with infinite values instead of four values. In order to eliminate the diversity of assigned values to students, at the end of the school year, the calculated values for each student will be rounded to the nearest value of the four standard values of the current descriptive evaluation method. It can be implemented in an appropriate smartphone application, which makes it much easier for teachers to assess the educational process of students. In this paper, the evaluation process of the elementary third-grade mathematics course in Iran during the period from the beginning of the MEHR (the seventh month of Iran) to the end of BAHMAN (the eleventh month of Iran) is examined by the proposed system. To evaluate the validity of this system, the proposed method has been simulated in MATLAB software.