Usefulness of Rubric in Assessing Writing Skills Using Clustering

Teaching-Learning process is incomplete without assessment part. The results of the assessment must represent various learning styles and weak areas of learners. Rubric is one popular assessment tool and is used for assessing subjective assessments such as assignments, essays, projects etc. In this paper, its power is exhibited in extracting useful observations about student learning in assessing writing skills. For this purpose, Fuzzy C-means Clustering technique is used to group the student written essays based on the ratings of two raters on six different traits according to the rubric given. The data is taken from one of the Kaggle datasets. The cluster results indicate that if good students pay a little more attention to their writing conventions, they can also come under the list of top performers. This type of revelation benefits those students who are weak in one or two performance areas and can improve quickly by being more attentive towards these.