How to classify students answers

Context

If you are a teacher with a large number of students, you probably want to get an idea of your students' typical answers to a given question without having to look at each of them individually.

LearnOCaml provides an (experimental) feature to automatically classify students answers. From a given identifier, LearnOCaml computes the disimilarities between students' answers and regroup them in different clusters, so that the teacher can only look at one representant of each cluster to get a fairly comprehensive overview of students' ways to approach the assignment.

How-to

Let's see how to analyze students' definitions of function foo in exercise x. Follow these steps:

Go to the teaching tab in the LearnOCaml Web UI (needs a teacher token).
Hold Ctrl (on macOS: Hold ⌘) and left click on the exercise x in the list of exercises.
Enter foo in the dialog box.

At this point, LearnOCaml opens a new window with the results.

References

For more details about how this classification internally works, have a look at asak, a library to identify similar OCaml pieces of code.