Askeptbot: A Machine-Learning Chatbot Companion for Disseminating English Placement Test Information

Abstract

The English Placement Test (EPT) allows first-semester diploma students at Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) to be exempted from the compulsory first-level English proficiency course if they sit and pass it. Communicating accurate and timely information about the test across the university's branch campuses has long been difficult, because there has been no single, centralised information hub, and important materials were often lost among the many messages exchanged between lecturers and students. This study introduces AskEPTbot, a machine-learning Telegram chatbot developed to act as a one-stop centre for EPT information that is accessible to both lecturers and students. Building the chatbot involved integrating EPT information into its knowledge database and enabling a machine-learning feature designed to return increasingly accurate responses as more users interact with it. The aim was to coordinate the EPT communication system and to ease the workload of the lecturers in charge (LICs) at 22 UiTM branches nationwide, who had previously answered hundreds of enquiries individually or through WhatsApp groups. A two-pronged quantitative design combined secondary data analysis of user analytics with a user satisfaction survey. Analytics from 5,067 users showed a high volume of repeat sessions and interactions per user, and the chatbot returned accurate responses in 94.61% of the sampled cases during a single evaluation week. Survey respondents also reported high satisfaction with the chatbot's usefulness, its ability to meet expectations, its response speed, the clarity of its replies, and its ease of use. AskEPTbot therefore functioned as a practical, well-used information hub and was designed to reduce the administrative burden on LICs.