Intelligent mathematics assessment in eMax

The emergence of the knowledge based society evoked a rapid expansion of student numbers enrolled in higher education. With increasing student numbers, however, the time necessary to assess the acquired knowledge in examinations approaches - or, with large student numbers, even exceeds-the time needed to deliver the lectures of a course. At the same time, distance learning systems have an urgent need to provide an integrated knowledge assessment component. These are the main reasons for the appearance of knowledge assessment systems (KAS's) in the 1970's as well as their steadily increasing importance. As shown in our paper, published KAS's do not support the evaluation of either freely formulated short answers or partially solved mathematical problems. However, the eMax KAS, developed at the Intelligent Knowledge Management Innovation Center of IBM Hungary and the John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics at Budapest Tech was conceived to fill this void. The short description of eMax and the method of quasi-automatic assessment of short texts can be found in a companion paper of the present conference. In this article we will demonstrate how eMax is capable of quasi-automatic assessment when answers are only partially correct, using questions of higher mathematics.