“OASIS-F”: development of a fuzzy online assessment system

A web-based tutorial and examination system has been developed in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Auckland. OASIS is an Online ASsessment and Information System. OASIS comprises an extensive question database and server-side program that delivers questions to students, marks their responses and records students’ activities and performance. In OASIS skills are developed by solving practical problems, which are all marked to give instant feedback. The students can practice on these problems from any web browser at any location on or off campus. Using OASIS does not require any special application software since all of the processing is done on the web server. Since 2000 the emphasis has been on giving students core-competency and skills but in a further development of OASIS a ‘fuzzy’ marking scheme is being introduced to allow marking of ‘softer’ subject material where ‘crisp’ numerical answers are inappropriate. Thus it will be possible to assess a student’s ‘understanding’ of some topic. OASIS-fuzzy allows a consistent marking scheme for these situations by assessing the student’s ability to ‘see the wood for the trees’. In OASIS-fuzzy the system measures what is in effect the ‘centre of gravity’ of the student’s knowledge on a particular topic by assessing their ability to rank information about that topic in order of importance. This we believe to be a measure of their ‘understanding’ of the topic. This paper presents a brief description of the system, its structure and its features.