Assessing students' answers and in particular natural language answers is a crucial challenge in the field of education. Advances in transformer-based models such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have led to significant progress in various natural language tasks. Nevertheless, amidst the growing trend of evaluating LLMs across diverse tasks,…

Access to high-quality education at scale is limited by the difficulty of providing student feedback on open-ended assignments in structured domains like programming, graphics, and short response questions. This problem has proven to be exceptionally difficult: for humans, it requires large amounts of manual work, and for computers, until…

The Microsoft Certification Program (MCP) includes many new computer-based item types, based on complex cases involving the Windows 2000 (registered) operating system. This Innovative Item Technology (IIT) has presented challenges beyond traditional psychometric considerations such as capturing and storing the relevant response data from…

A previously developed method of automatically selecting items for inclusion in a test subject to constraints on item content and statistical properties is applied to real data. Two tests are first assembled by experts in test construction who normally assemble such tests on a routine basis. Using the same pool of items and constraints articulated…

A method of qualitative data analysis that used computer software as a tool to help organize and analyze open-ended survey responses was examined. Reasons for using open-ended, as opposed to closed-ended questionnaire items, are discussed, as well as the construction of open-ended questions and response analysis. Because the method is based on…