Work in Progress: Development of Auto Grader for Explanation of Software Design Patterns - Initial Evaluation

Auto-graders could be useful in MOOCs. While they are useful for closed-ended questions, there is still ongoing re-search on auto-graders for open-ended questions. In the software design patterns course, students were often asked to explain how the patterns are implemented in their programs and manual grading such assessments could be time-consuming. We plan to develop an auto-grader for explanations of software design pat-terns. It ranks the submissions based on their comprehensiveness and then assigns quality marks to them. For our initial study, we present the ranking method. Our evaluation of 310 submissions shows that the ranking method is satisfactory with around 55 % top-K precision.