Exam Assessor Tool: An Automated System for Efficient Answer Sheet Evaluation

Abstract

With Education 4.0 and four quadrant approach number of innovations have gone into academics for efficient, experiential, and outcome-based education however assessment schemes are still very much dependent on manual assessment methods which are time-consuming and cumbersome. The grading system can sometimes be irrational, with diversified schemes for the same course and can also be biased. Covid 19 pandemic caused a global economic avalanche like we’ve never experienced in our lifetime. Many countries have implemented control measures such as blockades and curfews. The education system in this chaos saw a silver lining with academics shifting to online mode, with paradigm shift in teaching, assessment techniques too need to evolve. Work done is an effort to ease the process of assessment, a machine learning assisted model is developed that automates subjective answer evaluation in the education sector. Our project involved several crucial steps, including grayscale conversion, Natural Language Processing (NLP) for data cleansing, data splitting, and training an artificial neural network (ANN) to predict scores based on extracted features. ANN-based system grades subjective responses without human intervention, reducing the workload of teachers and professors. Model constructed an ANN architecture with three layers using Rectified Linear Activation Unit (ReLU) and Sigmoid activation functions. Trained model was incorporated into a user-friendly web application using the Streamlit library. Model design gives a major boost in grading efficiency and accuracy while providing valuable feedback to students. Research surveys were conducted, and a dataset was constructed for training and testing the model. study yielded an accuracy of 83.14% after employing techniques such as text cleaning, preprocessing, and feature extraction.