Abstract Student evaluation is an essential part of education and is done through the system of examinations. Examinations generally use question papers as an important component to determine the quality of the students. Examination question paper generation is a multi-constraint concurrent optimization problem. Question papers generated with random and backtracking algorithms are inefficient in handling multiple constraints such as total time... Student evaluation is an essential part of education and is done through the system of examinations. Examinations generally use question papers as an important component to determine the quality of the students. Examination question paper generation is a multi-constraint concurrent optimization problem. Question papers generated with random and backtracking algorithms are inefficient in handling multiple constraints such as total time for completion of the paper, total number of questions, module weightages, question types, knowledge points, difficulty level of questions etc,. In this paper we have proposed an innovative evolutionary approach that handles multi-constraints while generating question papers from a very large question bank. The proposed Elitist Multi-objective Differential Evolution Approach (EMODEA) has its advantage of simple structure, ease of use, better computational speed and good robustness. It is identified to be more suitable for combinatorial problems as compared to the generally used genetic algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is efficient and effective in generating near-optimal or optimal question papers that satisfy the specified requirements. Read More Read Less

Abstract Nowadays security concerns are central in software engineering. Moreover, the idea of incorporating security in agile software development has always been difficult because most of the security activities conflict with the agile principles. Agile development methodologies promise simple and iterative development with minimal documentation and a solution to rapidly changing environment. However, security techniques are complex and require too much... Nowadays security concerns are central in software engineering. Moreover, the idea of incorporating security in agile software development has always been difficult because most of the security activities conflict with the agile principles. Agile development methodologies promise simple and iterative development with minimal documentation and a solution to rapidly changing environment. However, security techniques are complex and require too much documentation thus not suited for agile methods. The goal of this paper is to select those security activities which are best to integrate with agile methods. This selection is based on two distinct measures, effectiveness and agility degree of security activities. The former indicates that the considered security activity will produce the intended result and ultimately reflects its impression in achieving security of software system. The latter refers to the flexible and low-cost ability of the security activity in providing effective responses to unpredictable changes. The challenge is to find the right mix of above said two measures according to project’s need. This has been accomplished in the proposed approach, CEASA (Combining Effectiveness and Agility of Security Activity), by using a weighted decision theory. Read More Read Less

Abstract Syllabuses are used to ensure consistency between educational institutions. A modularized syllabus contains weightages assigned to different units of a subject. Different criteria like Bloom’s taxonomy, learning outcomes etc., have been used for evaluating the syllabus coverage of a question paper. But we have not come across any work that focuses on syntactic text similarity evaluation of unit contents with... Syllabuses are used to ensure consistency between educational institutions. A modularized syllabus contains weightages assigned to different units of a subject. Different criteria like Bloom’s taxonomy, learning outcomes etc., have been used for evaluating the syllabus coverage of a question paper. But we have not come across any work that focuses on syntactic text similarity evaluation of unit contents with the question contents in order to estimate the syllabus coverage of a question paper. Hence in this paper we address the problem of measuring the syllabus coverage of an examination question paper by using the order based word-to-word syntactic similarity metric. Text preprocessing techniques are used to extract multiple words and its associated locations from textual contents in the question paper and also in the respective syllabus file. Comparison of word order vectors of units with word order vectors of questions results in generation of the corresponding common word pair question vector and common word pair syllabus vector. The common word pair vectors assist in computing the similarity measure between question vector and unit vector, representing the similarity measures in a question-to-unit similarity matrix and selecting the maximal similarity measure among the set of computed common word pair vectors. The maximal similarity measures are used as a guideline in grouping the unit-wise questions, matching its weightage against Syllabus File and evaluating the syllabus coverage of the question paper. The result of syllabus coverage evaluation can be used as a guideline by the subject expert or question paper setter or question paper moderator to revise the questions of examination question paper accordingly. Read More Read Less