Automatic essay assessment in e-learning using winnowing algorithm

Abstract

The pandemic has caused almost all educational institutions to use online learning media to support learning activities. E-learning is a technology that is widely used because it can accommodate all learning activities. However, in general, e-learning can only perform automatic assessments for multiple choice answers but not for essay answers, so that manual assessment by the teacher becomes difficult and takes a long time. In this study, the winnowing algorithm was applied to the automatic assessment process on students' essay answers by measuring their similarity to the teacher's answer key. The stages in the automatic assessment using the winnowing algorithm begin with forming a series of k-grams, calculating the hash value, forming a window from the hash value, calculating the fingerprint value, and calculating the Jaccard Coefficient to obtain the percentage of text similarity results. The test results show that the winnowing algorithm can provide good performance when the answers to questions are in the form of short entries with the number of hashes not smaller than the window value. Meanwhile, on questions with long answers, the winnowing algorithm can still work well with an average difference of 5.2% from the results of the assessment carried out by the teacher.