Patent Document ID: 7657221
Application ID: 11264984

Base Claim:
1. Apparatus for automatically examining a student's oral answer to a question, the apparatus comprising: an instructor-specified essay form ideal answer stored in a digital memory in text form, the ideal answer including one or more predetermined, instructor-selected and designated key words and/or phrases, wherein the designation comprises highlighting indicia included in the ideal answer, a student's answer given orally in response to an instructor-specified question and stored in a digital memory in text form; and a student answer evaluation and numerical-grade-assigning portion configured as computer-executable code, and comprising; a student answer examination and correction portion including grammar correction code and/or sentence structure correction code which, when executed by a computing device, is configured to examine and correct one or more of grammar and sentence structure in the stored text form student answer, and to store the corrected student answer in a digital memory in text four; a comparator mechanism including text correlation assessment code which, when executed by a computing device, is configured to access each of the ideal answer and the corrected student answer from each respective digital memory, and to assess a level of correlation between the ideal answer and the corrected student answer based at least in part upon a substantial semantic similarity between one or more words or phrases in the corrected student answer and the one or more predetermined, instructor-selected and designated key words or phrases in the ideal answer; and an automated numerical-grade assigning grading mechanism operatively coupled with the comparator mechanism and including numerical-grade assigning code which, when executed by a computing device, is configured to automatically calculate and assign a point score to the corrected student answer, by recording at least one point for each of a key word or phrase in the corrected student answer that semantically corresponds to at least one of the one or more predetermined key words or key phrases in the ideal answer, and to store the numerical student grade in a digital memory, wherein the point score comprises the recorded points and indicates a numerically-expressed level of correlation along a scale of possible correlation levels between the corrected student answer and the ideal answer.

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Claim 9:
9. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the grading mechanism further includes code which, when executed by a computing device, is configured to reduce the numerical point score by an amount corresponding to an extent of any corrections to one or more of the spelling, grammar and sentence structure in the stored text form student answer.