Indonesian Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Vol. 29, No. 1, January 2023, pp. 572~582 ISSN: 2502-4752, DOI: 10.11591/ijeecs.v29.i1.pp572-582  572 Journal homepage: http://ijeecs.iaescore.com Automatic essay assessment in e-learning using winnowing algorithm Eka Larasati Amalia, Vivin Ayu Lestari, Vivi Nur Wijayaningrum, Ali Ar Ridla Department of Information Technology, Politeknik Negeri Malang, Malang, Indonesia Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received Apr 12, 2022 Revised Oct 7, 2022 Accepted Oct 11, 2022 The pandemic has caused almost all educational institutions to use online learning media to support learning activities. E-learning is a technology that is widely used because it can accommodate all learning activities. However, in general, e-learning can only perform automatic assessments for multiple choice answers but not for essay answers, so that manual assessment by the teacher becomes difficult and takes a long time. In this study, the winnowing algorithm was applied to the automatic assessment process on students' essay answers by measuring their similarity to the teacher's answer key. The stages in the automatic assessment using the winnowing algorithm begin with forming a series of k-grams, calculating the hash value, forming a window from the hash value, calculating the fingerprint value, and calculating the Jaccard Coefficient to obtain the percentage of text similarity results. The test results show that the winnowing algorithm can provide good performance when the answers to questions are in the form of short entries with the number of hashes not smaller than the window value. Meanwhile, on questions with long answers, the winnowing algorithm can still work well with an average difference of 5.2% from the results of the assessment carried out by the teacher. Keywords: Education Jaccard coefficient Online course Similarity Text mining This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license. Corresponding Author: Eka Larasati Amalia Department of Information Technology, Politeknik Negeri Malang Soekarno Hatta 9 Street, Malang 65145, Indonesia Email: eka.larasati@polinema.ac.id 1. INTRODUCTION The use of e-learning in the learning process is a form of adjustment to the development of information technology. Several educational institutions have developed e-learning systems with various features that can support the ease of the learning process since before the pandemic until now [1]. With e-learning, the distribution of material from teachers and students can be easily carried out and coordinated. In addition, students can also collect assignments and work on exam questions on the e-learning platform. In essence, e- learning can be used by students and teachers to carry out all learning activities integrated into a system [2]– [4], so that e-learning makes the activities of the learning process more efficient, creates a pleasant learning experience for students, and increases their learning activities [5]–[7]. The e-learning existence makes it easy for teachers to evaluate student learning outcomes through taking exams or assignments. Exam questions can be arranged in various forms, such as multiple-choice, true or false, short answers, and essays. Of course, the mechanism for assessing student learning outcomes adjusts to the type of questions given to students. Essay questions are considered to be the most helpful technique for measuring student learning outcomes. Essay questions are considered as a measuring tool for students' ability to memorize, remember, analyze, and write the results of their thoughts [8]. With essays, students can demonstrate their skills and knowledge related to the learning material that has been received [9]. However,