Automatic Assessment of 3D Modeling Exams

Computer-based assessment of exams provides teachers and students with two main benefits: fairness and effectiveness in the evaluation process. This paper proposes a fully automatic evaluation tool for the Graphic and Virtual Design (GVD) curriculum at the First School of Architecture of the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. In particular, the tool is designed for the 3D modeling course, taught during the second year, where students have to prove their ability to model static scenes using the open source modeler Blender. During the final exam, students are required to create a 3D model as similar as possible to a reference object proposed by the teacher and shown through a set of 2D views; the similarity of the images is judged according to both model shape and materials. The traditional assessment process is particularly slow and strongly based on teachers subjective evaluation; the proposed solution efficiently implements an objective assessment mechanism that exploits computer vision and image analysis algorithms to automatically extract similarity indices. These indices are related to partial evaluation grades, which are then combined to obtain the final mark. A comparison with the traditional assessment process shows robustness and trustworthiness of the designed approach. (Contains 1 table and 6 figures.)