Automated Assessment with Multiple-choice Questions using Weighted Answers

A resource that has been used increasingly in order to assess people is the evaluation through multiple-choice questions. However, in many cases some test alternatives are wrong just because of a detail and scoring nought for them can be counter-pedagogical. Because of that, we propose an adaptation of the open-source system MCTest, which considers weighted test alternatives. The automatic correction is carried out by a spreadsheet that stores the students' responses and compares them with the individual answer keys of the corresponding test issues. Applicable to exams either in hardcopy or online, this study was validated to a total of 607 students from three different courses: Networks & Communications, Nature of Information, and Compilers.