A concept map based scenario for assessment of short and open answer questions

Knowledge assessment can be defined as the process to describe, collect and provide useful information to make decision concerning leaner progress and various approaches of learning to be adopted. The assessment of questions with open and short answers, where the learner has to develop a response going of some words to 5 lines, constitutes a type of complex assessment technique. In this paper, we present an approach which can assist tutors in assessment of questions with open and short response by using concept maps for the answers and semantic similarity measures between the texts. This short answer assessment is based on the reference response prepared by the tutor. Following a knowledge base generation starting from the important concepts of the learner and tutor answers, we propose to compare them with a similarity measure to calculate and deliver a final score to the answer.