Skip to main content
2 of 2
added 245 characters in body
Neil Strickland
  • 56.9k
  • 7
  • 142
  • 262

Automated assessment

In Sheffield we have increased our use of online automated assessment. We used to use a home-grown system, but have now switched to STACK with some home-grown extensions. Various other systems are available (e.g. WebWork, Numbas) but in my opinion STACK is significantly more intelligent and more able to give meaningful feedback to students based on detailed analysis of mathematical properties of their answers (provided that you put in the work to code that analysis). While the use of such systems is certainly not new, I am aware of a number of places that have significantly increased their engagement in the last year, and my guess is that the momentum will be sustained.

We have a large dataset from the last academic year consisting answers provided by students, feedback given in response, and answers modified in the light of that feedback. I am hoping to do some extensive analysis of this dataset over the summer, and it will be interesting to see what we can learn.

We have also made some initial attempts to assess and provide feedback on student attempts to write proofs. In most cases we provide a pool of phrases, from which they can select a subset and arrange them in appropriate order. I hope to do this much more extensively next year.

(In terms of social justice etc, I also helped a friend at the University of Nairobi to set up STACK there. It's easy to become blasé about working on a server in Kenya by ssh from the UK, but it is quite astonishing when you think about it.)

Neil Strickland
  • 56.9k
  • 7
  • 142
  • 262