A contribution to students’ assessment adjusts of multiple choice questionnaires with fuzzy logic

Abstract

In University environment, it is common to use multiple-choice objective tests with three or four possible answers, of which only one is correct and the rest are erroneous. In this type of tests, usually the wrong answers are penalized in order to avoid the effect of the random answers. However, there are questions that hardly students answer since their difficulty is high. On the other hand, there are also questions that answer virtually all students since their difficulty is simple. While sometimes the course professor chooses to suppress these questions, it is also common to leave them as part of the calculation of the overall score. This communication proposes a way of, without suppressing any question, making a readjustment of the grades based on fuzzy logic techniques. To do this, it is considered, on the one hand, the initial grade obtained by each student and, on the other, the total difficulty index of the test. With these two variables, an approximation can be made to a system of linguistic variables that allows correcting the final grades of each student based on the objective difficulty of the test and a set of rules established by the professor. This will revert to greater “justice” in students’ mark system, since it will be a function of the difficulty of the test.