Diagram matching for human-computer collaborative assessment

Diagrams are an important part of many assessments. When diagrams consisting of boxes joined by connectors are drawn on a computer, the resulting structures can be matched against each other to determine similarity. This paper discusses ways of doing such matching, and its application in the context of human-computer collaborative assessment. Results show that a simple heuristic process is effective in finding similarities in such diagrams. The practical usefulness of this varies in different contexts, as students often produce remarkably dissimilar diagrams.