Online automatic examination system for digital circuits

摘要

In the era of globalization and the Internet, the Universities must reshape curricula, to include asynchronous e-learning technologies in order to remain competitive and attract the best students and teachers. A technology that should be added to the arsenal of infrastructure programs is tele-examination. In this paper, the construction of a complete online automatic examination system of digital circuits is analyzed. Specifically, open source software was used to construct a dynamic website for automated student examination in order to support asynchronous e-learning, supported by an RDBMS database. The application development language is the dynamic programming language for web applications PHP, while we use the PDO extension for a safe and secure connection to the database. The system supports multiple classes and multiple categories for each lesson, which in turn can contain a number of tests, all of which are managed by the administrator (professor) through the web application. Moreover, questions and answers are constructed randomly by a generator program developed in C language. The professor can supervise an active test in real time, and modify the time period of the submission for each student. After the submission of an exam he has the options to grade the text and file type answers that were included in it, to oversee an analytical list of the answers given by each student and finally to produce PDFs with those answers and view various charts about the results. The exams are accessible either by authenticated students or by students who have received a personal identification number (token) or by free users with limited privileges.