Personalized Practice Exam Recommendation for Helping Students Prepare for Course Assessment

Abstract

Quizzes, tests and exams are commonly used as important formative and summative assessment tools to test student learning towards learning objectives. Practice exams are an effective tool to help students better prepare for real exams in an in-person as well as online course environment. Personalized practice exams will be more effective for supporting individual students’ success in course assessments. In this paper, we present a personalized practice exam recommender system to help students prepare and do better in the real course exams. Our practice exam recommendation is based on the student-to-student collaborative filtering using course, exam and exam question grades. We compute a target student’s predicted grade on each exam question in a real exam, and based on the predicted grades, construct and recommend a personalized practice exam for the target student. Practice exam recommendation can be done at the beginning of a semester or progressively in course throughout a semester by incorporating the target student’s performance on the completed real exams.