Final Report Assignment Based on Students’ Preferences to Topics and Partners

Abstract

To evaluate the learning performance of students, a final report is usually assigned. Students are asked to form a group which includes several students and they are assigned a specific topic to prepare a report. The way of assignment greatly influences on the results. The purpose of this study is to present a novel optimization approach to final report assignment which considers the preferences of students to topics as well as their partners. Initially, students are asked to indicate their preferences to some specific topics and their preferred co-operative partners. After aggregating preference data, a scoring system is used to evaluate the assignment. Mathematical Programming (MP) is employed and an evolutionary method is used to find solutions. Results from this study show that the proposed approach presented in this study can get good solutions efficiently.