Autonomous Grader - a New Digital Summative Assessment Tool

Assessment is an essential part of both traditional and online education. Regardless of the learning environment, assessment can be formative and summative, each with advantages and disadvantages in the digital era. In order to harness its possibilities in an online environment, educators must overcome certain challenges that technology-based assessment imposes. This paper includes an overview of the literature that covers tools that can be used as digital alternatives to traditional pen and paper tests. In order to maintain the positive learning environment in online education, assessment tools had to be adapted to the new learning environment in order to be accessible remotely to a large number of students. The paper discusses several advantages of digital assessment tools in light of their credibility, validity, and reliability, especially in case of summative digital tools, which includes the solution presented in this paper, the Autonomous grader. This tool, created with the purpose of promoting the use of technology in teaching, improves the testing system by offering effective, precise and unbiased grading of each individual assignment, reducing the time spent on grading. The proposed solution is a test environment utilizing Selenium tests. The solution includes a language for defining tasks and evaluation criteria used to generate individual Selenium tests. The result of the automatic evaluation process is a human-readable report containing the results of individual assignments. We conclude that this type of tool can be used effectively and can be a valuable asset to assessment in the digital age.