Implementation Guidelines for an Automated Grading Tool to Assess Short Answer Questions on Digital Circuit Design Course

Automated assessment tools are used to assess objective assessments such as multiple-choice questions and subjective tests such as essays. However, assessment tools for short answer questions are still not widespread despite their prevalence. Short answer question assessment is challenging because tools used to grade objective tests cannot cope with the natural language in the answers, while the limited text in the answers do not provide sufficient textual and lexical features for natural language assessment. In this work-in-progress paper, we present guidelines on how a short answer question assessment tool can be implemented for use in a digital circuit design course.