The Start

The whole thing came up with the sentence: "We want to provide an online Exam System for our Faculty, I want to have a simple Web page that generates random number of questions, marks them immediately, so we do not have to collect papers and go through the effort of ordinary exams." I replied "Great, I think we can do such a thing", but I had many things to say:

• I refused the idea of having students take Mid-Term exams from homes. I accept their taking of Assessments, but Exams NO Way. Any student can giver her/his ID and Password to her/his college, making her/him get the task done. Besides, we still face situations where you can find students without the internet access [i]. I need to have the student at my sight, knowing that s/he is whom s/he claims to be. Besides, need o know that s/he does not use all the available resources her/his hands can reach. This is not an Open Book Exam. I suggested we will have this exam at our laboratories, so we can manage the whole process.
  
• I refused the idea of pushing a students with a timer in the web page. I preferred to leave the time control matter to us; Exam Supervisors, to provide more flexibility of this process. We might face a situation where students find their KeyBoard or Mouse not working, we might face the situation where the PC stops responding, and stuff like that [ii].
• I did not mind giving the student the capability to submit the entire form as: Empty. Do you really mind? Do you think I have to force the student answering the Assessment; even when s/he does not want to ?? Actually, I do not think so. S/he has the right to submit an empty form, so what ;)
• I put in mind the situation I will face so soon; where almost all my teachers will ask me to provide the same experience, so I tried my best to manage that.
• The Assessment format was agreed upon in advance, to be: A Single Web page that displays Five MCQs and Five True/False questions. So, the total number of questions will be (Ten) with one mark for each question; that makes the final mark out of 10. I refused the idea of generating controls and assessment pages dynamically. I prepared templates to be filled dynamically with the suitable questions, based on the Assessment ID. Assessment ID is based on Courses [iii].
• The main decision was: This experience is a start. I hope it will work well, so we can proceed developing, enhancing this system, and think seriously about presenting similar solutions to enhance our Faculty life.
  

Thank You

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[i] Though it does not make any sense to any of us to hear the sentence "I do not have the PC here with me, I have it home" OR "I can not access the internet"; this is not acceptable due to the enormous amount of Technology Centers provided by the Ministry of Communications; those are free by the way, and the uncountable number of Cyber Cafes, but what I shall do when I hear this. Actually, nothing.

[ii] In normal situations, we shall not worry about events like that, unfortunately this is not the case at our Faculty, so, I decided to leave the timing open.

[iii] Database details are available under Database Label