Point Assignment Mechanism for Created Quizzes

Motivation

In order to enhance our application's utilization in the context of Quality of Service, we have decided to move forward with the implementation of an automatically point assignment mechanism for created quizzes. Moreover, solving process of a quiz should also affect points gained by user following this process. However, under this document, we will only cover point assignment mechanism for quiz creation.

Methodology

• It is decided to generate a mathematical formula that will calculate its score for a single question inside any quiz. Then, scores of all questions inside the created quiz will be summed up and this will be construct the point of the question.
• Features listed below will be used to create the mechanism for point-assignment of a single question.

Rarity

1. There are APIs enabling to capture the rarity of a word.
2. Some of them includes lexi-scoring, frequency-score, etc.
3. This score can be integrated to point calculation of a single question with its weight.
4. Datamuse API - returns rough estimate of rarity.
5. Wordnik API - frequency data.
6. Oxford Dictionaries API - lexistats
7. vocabkitchen - understand cefr level of a sentence

Word Complexity

• Longer sequence of characters, more syllables generally indicates harder words.
• This can be easily partitioned mathematically in the backend side with a lower weight.

Word Part of Speech

• Decide to type of the word
• Noun-verb (easy), adjectives & adverbs (medium), conjuction & preposition (hard)
• These difficulty levels can imply a scoring weight under this aspect.

Abstract or Idiomatic Words

• Abstract ones are generally easy to understand.
• Again Oxford Dictionary API or calls to website can be utilized.

Length of definition

• Words that require longer explanations or more complex examples to define are generally harder to learn.
• babel can help with this problem with a binary selection whether long or short description.

Score Calculation of Question

• Above features can help with selecting which attributes of a question should contribute to score calculation of a created quiz.
• Using a combination of them instead of using all may be more efficient way of reflecting scores.
• All features for scoring should be normalized in the same range between two natural numbers such as 0-3, 1-5, etc.
• Score enabling features design can include weights.
• Total score of a single question can be calculated using these weights included.
• Lastly, points can be rounded to numbers multiple of 10 for simplicity on the user side.