"Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. Student[s] are given either a list of terms or overall topics, and are told to link them based on their assessment of importance and relation. Based on the work of J. Turns, the concept map is an assessment tool based on nodes and arcs. Nodes are the individual words or phrases that the student is associating. Arcs connect the nodes with one another, typically in an outward fashion, in which there are more nodes the further one gets from the center node. The most important and/or central part of the concept map is placed in the center node. Connected outwards from the center node are the terms that the student deems to be a subset or close relation of the center term. ...[W]e took a series of steps that simplified the complex and diverse concept maps that were created by the students. The first method was to encode the data into an Excel file in order to count the occurrences of each word as a set towards creating a single concept map that embodied the perspectives of the class. We weighted a word based on a point system that rewarded terms that were closer to the center of the concept map."