e-Examination

If i make a blog post saying "today we conducted an exam" then most of you would laugh and think whats the big deal of conducting an exam in an university department. 

But the change that we did here is that the exam was "on-line". This time around, we have conducted Part -A of the end-semester examinations online. This consisted of 20 questions in each subject and today's exam was of 100 questions. 

The "experiment with truth" was conducted with the I year M.Sc students. Let me narrate the background story as well.

Many weeks ago we decided that the Part -A of the end semester would be an online exam, as a step towards utilization of technology, reduction in the usage of paper there by following the green energy principles. 

Kudos to the thoughts of Prof. RS. Every time I talk with him, the glimpses of IIT-D would emanate which I have found as a source of inspiration. 

The hardware / software stack responsiblity was given to me by him i.e. I have to make ready the necessary implementations so that the exam would be smooth as a song.

One of my another sincere colleague Prof TS(iva kumar) was given the task of coordination. So the tasks began. Most of my students were busy with the buzzzz of placements this year. So i was not able to dedicate the task to anyone. More over Prof RS is very serious about the quality of tasks.

So I had to handle it myself. The platform I feel comfortable is the PHP, mySql and Apache. Found out an open-source tool under GPL License. But then it was not working "as it is". Need to make many modifications both in code as well as in config files. 

Yesterday I completed the tasks and there was a demo to Prof RS. He indicated few points which i had to implement in a hurry. Finally signed-it off to TS by evening. Last night Prof TS made all the necessary entries  himself. Being the end semester exam the confidentiality should also be maintained. So he took this decision that he wud enter everything himself. Yet another proof for his dedication towards the work. I am proud to be surrounded by these types of quality centric people.

Today the exams started as we planned. I was a bit worried about the load on the server. But then everything was smooth. It is decided to give a feedback form to the students regarding the test. To our surprise, 99.95% of students liked the test, and expressed their support. One point that was common across all these feedback forms was the seem-less flow and its easiness to use. 

Immediately we displayed the results to them. 

Felt very joyous in the end. Yes.. Without purchasing any costly properitery examination tools, without going for complicated tools like "moodle" we completed it. That too with Open source.

One more confirmation for my belief that 

"If you want to make something successful keep it simple as much as possible".