XML-based fully automatic assessment system for IT skills

The need for IT skills assessment and certification is indisputable for both persons and institutions. Thus, the recourse to automatic assessment systems able to answer the strong demand of such assessment or certification is inevitable. In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically assess IT skills in authentic context. This approach relies on the potential of XML format and its related efficient technologies which allow the extraction of information from XML documents. We divide our assessment approach into two steps. In the first, we transform both Students documents and answers model to an intermediate representation using XML format for which some preprocessing is done. In the second step, we extract from the teacher's correct document the required skills as paths of the tree representation of the XML document. In order to assign a mark we measure similarities between these paths and those of the student document. We have conducted an experimental study to validate our approach. Thus, we have developped a tool based on the proposed approach to automatically assess Word Processing skills using Microsoft Office Word program. The evaluation of our tool is performed on a real exam with one hundred students. The results show the accuracy and the suitability of this solution for assessing IT skills.