Evaluating students’ answerscripts using vague values

Abstract

It is obvious that education institutions must provide students with the evaluation reports regarding their test/examination as sufficient as possible and with the unavoidable error as small as possible. In this paper, we present a new method for evaluating students’ answerscripts using vague values, where the evaluating marks awarded to the questions in the students’ answerscripts are represented by vague values. The vague mark awarded to each question of a student’s answerscript can be regarded as a vague set, where each element in the universe of discourse belonging to the vague set is represented by a vague value. An index of optimism λ determined by the evaluator is used to indicate the degree of optimism of the evaluator, where λ∈[0,1]. The larger the value of λ, the more optimistic the evaluator. The smaller the value of λ, the more pessimistic the evaluator. The proposed method can evaluate students’ answerscripts in a more flexible and more intelligent manner.