Exam Administration System

Inspiration

The West African Examination Council (WAEC), which runs the multi-national examinations for both Junior High and Senior High Schools, has been using a failing system to organize these exams for some time now. This has led to fraudulent practices at almost every step in the process; from the creation of questions to the selection and acceptance of candidates into schools after the exams, there have been reports of malpractice. With a long history of cheating scandals, there has been a drastic reduction and loss of trust in certificates gotten from the Examinations, despite it being the national official criteria for getting into your next level of school in Ghana. Solving the problem of hosting these exam sessions will make the examination fair for every student, giving a chance to not only the people with power and money, but the entire body of candidates to pass and get into their dream schools.

What it does

Using blockchain, most of the original problems can be eliminated through automation, transparency, and moving most exams online.

Steps:

Each student can be given a unique ID by a smart contract where only the smart contract knows the information of the students.

For the selection of questions: Each question in the question pool can be given a unique number. Next, a smart contract using ChainLinks VRF can be given the range of numbers assigned to the questions and the total number of questions to select for each section through randomness on the day of the exam. Another more complex method of selection is each student getting a question given to them by the smart contract and this question is stored alongside their ID.

For identification of students: Each student will be given that unique ID that the contract assigned their info. Upon arrival to the test center, all the student needs to do is secretly enter their ID/fingerprint into the smart contract using a UI. The smart contract returns the face of the student and the examiner uses that to verify that the student is indeed not an imposter.

For marking: Because only the smart contract knows the information of the student, no randomness has to be done by a human. Each teacher can either :

Select their choice of IDs (representing an anonymous student)
The smart contract still randomizes the selection for each teacher The marking is then done online with transparency and fairness as the marks given for each answer to a particular ID’s question can also be reviewed by the whole organization and the student either in real-time or later on.

How we built it

Parts Needed:

Blockchain (ethereum)
Blockchain Database for storing questions and info of students(image, name, school, etc)
Chainlink verifiable random numbers
One large smart contract or 4 separate ones for each process of the examination.
UI for pushing the data of the student, and returning their unique ID.
UI for displaying the randomized questions selected by the blockchain and for submission of exam
UI for teachers to mark the exams online and submit the scores
UI to display marks given by teachers
UI to display a student's allocation upon entry of their unique ID.

Challenges we ran into

This was a sharp learning curve as this was our first time interacting with smart contracts. We managed to create most of the contracts needed but could only manage to link 2 parts of the contract (registering exams and students) due to time constraints. We, however, managed to create the frontend interface and the server that handles API requests from the frontend and interacts with the database and contracts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our web app which was successfully created with a multipage React frontend and a Node backend server that communicated with MongoDB through Mongoose. We are also very proud of being able to fully understand and partially implement the system we had in mind.

What we learned

Interacting with ipfs, infura, remix, node.js, mongoose, mongoDB, react.js, web3.js, and using the chainlink VRF

What's next for Exam Administration System

We plan on fully implementing the system as it would help level the playing field during examinations and help Improve the standard of living of students from Ghana and West Africa.