Introduction
Before the advancement of Information Technology (IT), students’ academic performances were evaluated via paper-based system of assignments and tests. Since recent progress in state-of-the-art IT has advanced significantly, educational products are now available electronically and new methods of educational assessment have emerged. The evolution of the Internet, therefore, gives rise to the availability of radical new means of examination administration in education.
noted that one important area of application of the web technology is in the development of web-based testing and assessment.
The World Wide Web (WWW) has gained popularity within educational sector and become an inexpensive, easily accessible way to communicate, disseminate information, teach and examine courses and conduct researches. Consequently, there exists wide preference and adoption of web-based testing and assessment over the traditional paper-based method of assessment which has over decades been characterized by examination questions leakages, human errors during the marking and recording of scores. Web-based testing and assessment systems offer greater flexibility than the traditional approach because test could be offered at different times by students and in different locations. e-Examination system rides on the huge success of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its various features, security, reliability and consistency. The system simplifies the examination process by computer aided control and automatic marking to reduce the complex paper
In this current adoption of ICT towards promoting distance education where distance between learners and instructors is no longer a barrier, Web-based Examination System (WES) is an effective solution for mass education evaluation. The system is based on a Browser/Server framework which carries out the examination and auto-grading for objective questions. The system facilitates conducting examinations, collection of answers, auto marking the submissions and production of reports for the test. It will be used via Internet and is therefore suitable for both local and remote examination.
The system developed reduces the large proportion of workload on examination, grading and reviewing. It also has the potentials to reduce drastically examination malpractice as examinees are duly authenticated online in a real-time manner and their results are released some few minutes after the completion of the examination because where the lecturer would spend weeks marking scripts and grading manually, the computer would grade the students as soon as they finish their paper, get their already stored continuous assessment and produce their eventual result. It also enhances effective distance education as examinees can write examination in any part of the world and equally get their results instantly.
Traditional versus Web-based Tests
In educational institutions, tests are conducted to evaluate the academic progress of learners; review, compare and measure the effectiveness of methods of instruction; serve as basis of guidance and counselling to students, selection for prize award and employment and grading for the purpose of certification.
In the context of education system, one possible purpose of a test is to assess whether a learner has attained an educational goal. The outcome of such a test can help instructors analyze problems with his method(s) of instruction and to better understand the learner’s strengths and weaknesses in a given subject. Test can be used to fine-tune the instruction environment or method based on the analytical results to improve the instructor’s teaching performance. There are currently two methods for conducting tests: (i) The traditional method of using paper and pencil tests, including the creation of test items, the grading of students’ test sheets, and the analysis of learner’s responses for each test item, which is considered to be tedious.
Computer-Based Tests, an electronic examination, allows test activities to be carried out using different electronic platform/environment. Basically, the electronic examination (e-Examination) system involves the conduction of examinations using various electronic devices (mobile phones, computers etc) connected to the testing system via the Internet or the Intranet. The process is predominantly automated, which means the administration, grading, reviewing of the examination is of little effort. Usually the examination is in form of multiple-choice test.
Others define e-examination as a system that involves the conduct of examinations through the web or the intranet. They proposed a model for e-Examination in Nigeria where all applicants are subjected to online entrance examination as a way of curbing the irregularities as proposed by the Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB), a body saddled with the responsibility of conducting entrance examinations into all the Nigerian universities. This model was designed and tested in Covenant University, one of the private universities in Nigeria. Their findings revealed that the system has the potentials to eliminate some of the problems that are associated with the traditional methods of examination such as impersonation and other forms of examination malpractices.
The function of ‘self-assessment’ is equipped with item pools and teachers can administer and construct examinations easily through the Internet. They also pointed out that the advantages of item pools are that ‘teachers are able to incorporate large item banks (item pools) from textbook publishers and batch load these questions with a minimum of manual effort’. Moreover, it is stated that teachers who administer and construct an examination through the Internet have the advantage of helping students to check their understanding of the learning materials at all hours.
An assessment system was developed using Triple-A Model (assembling, administering, and appraising) as the baseline qualification in order to provide the most comprehensive form of Computer-Based Test (CBT) or Web-Based Test (WBT) and to be more suitable for teacher education. The Triple-A Model includes the essential functions of CBT system. Assembling deals with the construction of item pools, test items, and schedules of tests. Administering is to assign the test items and item choices randomly, provide examination passwords for testees to apply the test through Web as well as collecting and recording the scores data of the tests. Appraising focuses on analyzing the collected/processed data of tests and to generate the statistic report.
In another research work, a web-based online examination system was proposed. The system carries out the examination and auto-grading for student’s examinations. The system facilitates conducting examinations, collection of answers, auto marking the submissions and production of reports for the test. It supports many kinds of questions. It was used via internet and is invariably suitable for both local and remote examination. The system could help lecturers, instructors, teachers and others who are willing to create new examinations or edit existing ones as well as students participating in the examinations.
The system was built using various open source technologies. AJAX, PHP, HTML and
MYSQL database are used in this system. An auto-grading module was generalized to enable different examination and question types. The system was tested in the Mansoura University Quality Assurance Centre. The test proved the validity of using this kind of web based systems for evaluating students in the institutions with high rate of students.
Computer-Based Evaluation
In many tertiary institutions in Nigeria, the conduct of examinations as well as the process of producing results has been fraught with various problems leading to inability to release results on time, inability of some students to get their results and several incomplete results. These problems can be mitigated using electronic medium.
E-examination, as used in this paper, refers to a system that involves the conduct of examinations through the web or the intranet using the computer system. Recently, because Internet and database technology have been fully developed, CBT which before was once hosted only on personal computers (PCs) or local area networks (LANs), has now gradually been upgraded to work on the Internet using browsers as the test interface so that users can use it anywhere in the world. WES has been seen to be an effective solution for mass education evaluation.
Computer-based examination and test tools have been applied for different purposes, e.g. placement tests, entry-level tests (prognostic tests), self-assessment tests, regular written and oral examinations (selective and diagnostic examinations), and online surveys.
How to design the web-based system
The application was developed using different programming models and languages which include HTML, CSS and PHP (for the front-end interface) and MYSQL (for the backend) and served through a web server, APACHE. The use of HTML and CSS, which is a markup language for information presentation and a styling language respectively, allow for the user-interface to be designed and properly laid out. To enable dynamic content generation, PHP (a web scripting language) is used to generate dynamic contents based on the user of the system and the corresponding content stored in the backend database which is managed by MySQL. The web server is used to serve the webpages to users when they are needed, and also to interpret the PHP scripting commands contain in the page. In other words, the computer simply acts as the medium for students to take examinations, for teachers to construct tests, and for the transmission of test papers.
Design stages
This defines some steps which consist of front-end analysis, learner analysis, task analysis, concept analysis, specifying instructional analysis. Design consists of criterion test construction, media selection, format selection, initial design. It consists of expert appraisal and development testing and disseminate.
Front-end Analysis Student Analysis Observation Interview The goal specification to design CBT Compiling the test instrument Define Suffrage the software for CBT – download and install xampp – download and install model Initial design CBT Design the CBT – create the test in CBT – input the test in CBT – input the user Validation – judgment expert of test – judgment expert of CBT Limited Trial in School Design Figure 1: The Stages of Design with model software, (2) instrument test, (3) CBT validation, (4) test validation, (5) questionnaire for students, (6) the list of interview for students. The techniques to collect the data were observation, questionnaire, and interview. The validation sheets was addressed to the judgment experts to know the effectiveness of CBT.
Figure 1: stages of design
Structured Query Language (SQL)
This is the standard language designed to access relational databases.
Relationship schema diagram
Figure 2: Architecture of the system (schema)
CBT Diagram for users
Use case diagrams for each entity present in the CBT system are shown below. These include use case diagram for the administrator, teacher and student.
System Use Case diagram
The use cases diagram in Figure 3 shows the activities that are required of the department, administrator and student, including the upload of teacher’s/student’s details and creation of default password for users as well as upload and access to course outline/content
| Department |
Figure3: System Use Case diagram
System requirements and specifications
Functional Requirements
Functional requirement defines the capabilities and functions that a system must be able to perform successfully. They are the quantifiable and measureable requirements of the system In software engineering and system engineering a functional requirement defines a function of a system or its component. These functions are the set of inputs, the behavior and outputs of the system in question. In order words it captures the intended behavior of the system. This behavior may be expressed as services, tasks or functions the system is required to perform and it shows the features that differentiate the system from other systems. Functional requirements should include: Descriptions of data to be entered into the system, descriptions of operations performed by each screen, descriptions of work-flows performed by the system, which can enter the data into the system and how the system meets applicable regulatory requirements
The intended software’s functions are highlighted below:
- The system has a homepage where respective users (administrator & students) can login to perform their different operations.
- The system has the test page where the student would be presented with test questions to be answered by him/her. The system then automatically adds the marks allocated in each question to determine the total mark for the test.
Non-functional Requirements
These define system properties and constraints. They are the non-quantifiable and non-measureable requirements of the system e.g. reliability, response time and storage requirements. Constraints are I/O device capability, system representations, etc. It is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviors. This should be contrasted with functional requirements that define specific behavior or function.
Implementation languages
- Cascading Style Sheet (CSS)
It is a set of rules that allow user to control how the web document will appear in the web browser. It defines the formatting applied to a Website, including colors, background images, typefaces (fonts), margins, and indentation.
- Hyper Text Mark-up Language (HTML)
It is the core technology in which all Web pages are written. HTML is not a programming language rather it is a mark-up language for collection of mark-up tags to describe Web pages.
- Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP)
It is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is specifically suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
Web-based Evaluation System (WES) Phases
Implementation (report generation)
- The presentation phase offers an interface to the user.
The user interface (frontend) of a system is the part of the system that the end user interacts with. User interface design is concerned with how users add information to the system and with how the system presents information back to them. Usability is the ease with which a user can learn to operate, prepare inputs for, and interpret outputs of system or component. Example is the Student’s login/register page.
Student’s login/register page
Figure 4: frontend (user input screen)
Student login
This is the default page of the system. It is also known as the homepage of the system that automatically loads after the URL has been requested for by a web browser on the client system. It contains the log in section for the student to provide their details which is used to authenticate the student to gain access to the system. This page is depicted in Figure 4. The student logs-in with the matriculation number and password. The page also contains a link to the teacher login section.
- Relational database for storage
The data in MySQL are stored in tables. MySQL workbench is a unified visual tool for database architectures, developers, and DBAs. It provides data modeling, SQL development and comprehensive administration tools for server configuration, user administration, backup and much more. MySQL workbench enables a DBA, developer, or data architect to manage databases. It includes everything a data modeler needs for creating complex Entity Relational (ER) models, forward and reverse engineering and also delivers key features for performing difficult change management and documentation tasks that normally require much time and effort. MySQL workbench delivers visual tools for creating, executing and optimizing SQL queries. The SQL editor provides color syntax highlighting, auto-complete, reuse of SQL snippets and execution history of SQL. The database connections panel enables developers to easily manage database connections. The object browser provides instant access to database schema and objects.
Figure 5: Database storage
- The database phase or question bank serves as the repository of a pool of questions to be answered by the student. Database design is concerned with how data is represented and stored within the system. The examination questions, answers, grades, and reviews must be stored in a persistent way. Moreover, we need to keep information about the students. The system stores the above information in a MySQL Database server. Such database has been chosen since it is open source, and there are implementations available for the main architectures.
The student result page is presented in Figure 6. This module is used to display the result of the student in the concluded examination, the result is computed based on the number of option specified by the teacher or answered in a preferred format presented by the teacher.
Figure 6: Student result page
Conclusion/discussion
It is not enough to focus on the passing required skills to the learners in distance education but to equally furnish them with their performances shortly after evaluation without hitch.
The e-examination system, if fully optimized and introduced into the institutions, will go a long way to control and check examination malpractices and all fraudulent acts associated with the manual process of writing examination. However, for the system to be adopted on a large scale, efforts should be intensified to ascertain its disadvantage on accounts of IT illiteracy on the part of the students, by making the interface easy to interact with. Also, to ensure that the e-examination system is not intensified by those that may want to engage in any form of examination malpractice, the addition of user authenticated protocol/methods such as biometrics (fingerprint, retina, iris etc) identification will be of good help.
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