Evaluating the performances of Dice, Jaccard, Overlap, and Cosine coefficients in automated marking of algebraic equations / Hasnah Yusof, Wan Rolini Wan Yusoff and Masita Jamal

Computers enable the automation of many tasks and made great contributions in many areas where learning process takes place. Assessment plays an important role in the learning process of many courses and mathematics is no exception. However, the marking activity takes up valuable time and energy, thus automated marking could be a solution. In this research, four similarity measures Dice, Jaccard, Overlap and Cosine (DJOC) coefficients have been employed in the automated marking of four simple algebraic equations in open/ subjective form. The performances of DJOC are compared to the manual marking which is the benchmark. Data was obtained from the solutions to 4 simple algebraic equations given by 180 Universiti Teknologi MARA students of different programmes within the Shah Alam campus. The algorithm used in the automated marking was adjusted to fit the DJOC coefficients. Results for the case of correct worked out solutions and the case of incorrect worked out solutions suggest some modifications needed to be done to the existing algorithm before the case of partially correct worked-out solutions are explored. The automated marking of simple algebraic equations using DJOC coefficients is feasible and further research should be done to obtain threshold values for each of the measure.