"Did my figure do justice to the answer?" : Towards Multimodal Short Answer Grading with Feedback (MMSAF)

Personalized feedback plays a vital role in a student's learning process. While existing systems are adept at providing feedback over MCQ-based evaluation, this work focuses more on subjective and open-ended questions, which is similar to the problem of Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) with feedback. Additionally, we introduce the Multimodal Short Answer grading with Feedback (MMSAF) problem over the traditional ASAG feedback problem to address the scenario where the student answer and reference answer might contain images. Moreover, we introduce the MMSAF dataset with 2197 data points along with an automated framework for generating such data sets. Our evaluations on existing LLMs over this dataset achieved an overall accuracy of 55\% on Level of Correctness labels, 75\% on Image Relevance labels and a score of 4.27 out of 5 in correctness level of LLM generated feedback as rated by experts. As per experts, Pixtral achieved a rating of above 4 out of all metrics, indicating that it is more aligned to human judgement, and that it is the best solution for assisting students.

Can AI Assistance Aid in the Grading of Handwritten Answer Sheets?

With recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), there has been growing interest in using state of the art (SOTA) AI solutions to provide assistance in grading handwritten answer sheets. While a few commercial products exist, the question of whether AI-assistance can actually reduce grading effort and time has not yet been carefully considered in published literature. This work introduces an AI-assisted grading pipeline. The pipeline first uses text detection to automatically detect question regions present in a question paper PDF. Next, it uses SOTA text detection methods to highlight important keywords present in the handwritten answer regions of scanned answer sheets to assist in the grading process. We then evaluate a prototype implementation of the AI-assisted grading pipeline deployed on an existing e-learning management platform. The evaluation involves a total of 5 different real-life examinations across 4 different courses at a reputed institute; it consists of a total of 42 questions, 17 graders, and 468 submissions. We log and analyze the grading time for each handwritten answer while using AI assistance and without it. Our evaluations have shown that, on average, the graders take 31% less time while grading a single response and 33% less grading time while grading a single answer sheet using AI assistance.