Learning is one of the defining aspects of the current human society. The educa-tional system, through its public schools and universities, provide students with theframeworks for learning and testing their knowledge
Assessment of students knowledge level in specific areas of a subject representsa problem that all teachers and university professors have to deal with during theircourses. It is important for them to continuously have an overview of the studentscapabilities and their understanding of previous concepts in order to better plan thenext teaching sessions. As the lectures are time bounded, this continuous knowledgetesting has to be made as accurately as possible in a relatively short amount of time,as they are usually used during or between the sessions.
One approach is to give students a quiz at the beginning or the end of each session in order to test their understanding of the concepts that would later be used during the course. The ability to quickly answer and correctly assess this quizzes impacts the quality of the teaching which also indirectly affects the students understanding of the subject.
Perfectly accurate assessments require asking the students each and every possible question regarding that subject they are tested in, requiring a large amount of time. In the case of this session quizzes, which are supposed to be very short, this is not a viable solution. Considering this fact, the problem of continuous knowledge testing during a course reduces itself to the ability of assessing the knowledge level of a student in a specific subject as accurately as possible by asking as few questions as possible.
Most of the quizzes used today are standardized, meaning they try to include questions from all the aspects of the tested subject area at all the difficulty levels. It is often the case that the subject is too large and the tests end up having to exclude some of the areas or difficulty levels all together in order to reduce the time used for answering and assessing them. This approach can lead to inaccurate knowledge assessments for particular subject areas.
The issue with the standardized testing approach is that it is completely static. The quizzes are designed to include as many questions as the time permits in order to assess each possible student knowledge level at all the difficulties. Even if some students have answered the most difficult questions in a specific area, they still need to answer all the other, easier question in the same area. For those particular students, having to answer those easy questions represents a waste of time that could have been used more efficiently by the quiz to address other subject areas instead.
The objective of this project is to solve the problem of accurate and fast knowledge assessment by designing an interactive testing system which adapts in an intelligent manner to the students and is able to accurately assess their knowledge level of a subject while recommending areas where they can improve, by using a small number of questions.