Powergrading: a Clustering Approach to Amplify Human Effort for Short Answer Grading

Sumit Basu, Chuck Jacobs, Lucy Vanderwende


Abstract
We introduce a new approach to the machine-assisted grading of short answer questions. We follow past work in automated grading by first training a similarity metric between student responses, but then go on to use this metric to group responses into clusters and subclusters. The resulting groupings allow teachers to grade multiple responses with a single action, provide rich feedback to groups of similar answers, and discover modalities of misunderstanding among students; we refer to this amplification of grader effort as “powergrading.” We develop the means to further reduce teacher effort by automatically performing actions when an answer key is available. We show results in terms of grading progress with a small “budget” of human actions, both from our method and an LDA-based approach, on a test corpus of 10 questions answered by 698 respondents.
Anthology ID:
Q13-1032
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 1
Month:
Year:
2013
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Editors:
Dekang Lin, Michael Collins
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
391–402
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/Q13-1032
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00236
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sumit Basu, Chuck Jacobs, and Lucy Vanderwende. 2013. Powergrading: a Clustering Approach to Amplify Human Effort for Short Answer Grading. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1:391–402.
Cite (Informal):
Powergrading: a Clustering Approach to Amplify Human Effort for Short Answer Grading (Basu et al., TACL 2013)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/Q13-1032.pdf