Thesis

Journal of Information Technology Education Innovations in Practice

Volume 11, 2012

Automatic Grading of Spreadsheet and Database Skills

Zlatko J. Kovačić and John Steven Green Open Polytechnic, Wellington, New Zealand

Zlatko.Kovacic@openpolytechnic.ac.nz John.Green@openpolytechnic.ac.nz

Executive Summary

Growing enrollment in distance education has increased student-to-lecturer ratios and, therefore, increased the workload of the lecturer. This growing enrollment has resulted in mounting efforts to develop automatic grading systems in an effort to reduce this workload. While research in the design and development of automatic grading systems has a long history in computer education, only a few attempts have been made to automatically assess spreadsheet and database skills. This paper has three purposes: (1) to describe the design of an assessment in the Information Systems course at the Open Polytechnic to assess students’ spreadsheet and database skills, (2) to describe the development of an automatic grading system to assess spreadsheet and database skills, and (3) to compare automatic with manual marking to determine if automatic grading system is a feasible method of reducing workload. The automatic grading system we developed uses Excel’s user-defined functions to automatically check whether a feature or a function has been used. Since the outcomes from user-defined functions are scrambled, students verify their own answers by entering the results from these functions into an online quiz. As a result, there is no need for the lecturer to download, open, and check the actual software application. The system recognizes correct answers from these scrambled inputs and allocates marks. This system is integrated into the Moodle learning management platform and linked to the students’ academic record database. The main difference between the automated grading system for the assessment of spreadsheet and database skills described in this paper and existing systems...