SYNOPSIS

ON

AUTOMATED INVIGILATION
ASSIGNMENT SYSTEM

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY

Computer Science

SUBMITTED BY

Anjali Sagar, Archana, Seema Pundir, Swati

Roll No. 2602, 2566, 2601, 2596

October, 2016

(Under the Supervision of Pankaj Sambyal)

KALINDI COLLEGE FOR WOMEN,

University of Delhi
Table of Content

1) Introduction

2) Problem Description

 Existing System

 Drawbacks

 Constraints

3) Reason for choosing the topic

4) Objective and scope of the project

5) Methodology

 Module 1

 Module 2

 Module 3

6) Hardware & Software Requirements

7) Testing Technology

 Unit Testing

 Integration Testing

 Testing With Artificial Data

 Testing With Live Data

8) References
INTRODUCTION

This project is concerned with the Invigilator-Exam Assignment problem. A web-based Automated
Invigilator Assignment System (AIAS) consists of a mathematical model; a database storing the
information and web-based user interfaces is constructed to solve the problem by providing an
environment for a practical usage. The core of the system is the mathematical model developed for
obtaining the exact solution. We conclude the project by presenting a real-life problem solved by the
proposed approach.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION

An invigilator is the person who supervises students during an examination.

Existing System: The allocation of invigilators involves all the lecturing staff who follows a set of
invigilation schedule that is prepared manually by fellow lecturers in the college.

Drawbacks: - Preparing the examination invigilation schedule has always been in itself a challenging
task as the invigilation schedule committee has to take into consideration numerous factors and lecturers’
constraints such as:-

 Getting the invigilation schedules ready within a limited time frame,

 Ensuring the invigilation duties assigned to the lecturers do not disrupt their marking,
 The lecturers do not invigilate their own subjects,
 Prior to the present invigilation scheduling committee taking over the responsibility of preparing
the invigilation schedules, invigilation duties were assigned randomly and, hence, there were a lot
of mutual swapping amongst the lecturers resulting in confusion, misunderstandings and
complaints on uneven duty distribution.
 Finally, the manual solution of the timetabling problem usually requires many person-days of
work. In addition, the solution obtained may be unsatisfactory in some respect.
Constraints
 Invigilator-exam assignment is a problem of assigning invigilators to exams in such a way that
there are no conflicts or clashes.
  Usually an invigilator is assigned more than one exam, and more than one invigilator is needed
for an exam. An invigilator should not be scheduled to invigilate more than once in the same time
slot.
 There may be preferences, inconvenient assignments, and pre-assignments related to invigilator-
exam and/or invigilator-time slot pairs.

Invigilator-exam assignment problem actually has a multi-objective structure like real-life decision
problems. In recent years, multi-objective decision making has become a promising field.

Thus in this sophisticated era, we saw the need for a systematic and yet innovative approach to produce
invigilation schedules that could minimize errors and simultaneously allowed lecturers to request for
their preferred invigilation dates and time.

REASON FOR CHOOSING THIS TOPIC

This project Examination Invigilation Scheduling System in Optimizing Lecturers’ Preference

presents a real-world invigilators scheduling timetabling problem from our Delhi University colleges,
New Delhi. It represents a major administrative activity for academic institutions. It is often a difficult
and demanding process and it affects a significant number of people.

The problem involves assigning lecturers’ as invigilators to examination rooms is aimed to facilitate the
preparation of examination invigilation schedules so as to reduce manual involvement and the amount of
time taken to prepare examination invigilation schedules.

In modeling, and solving, this problem we assume that there is already an examination timetable in place
and the task is to assign invigilators to that timetable. The contributions of this project are to formally
define the invigilator scheduling problem and to present a constructive algorithm that is able to produce
good quality solutions that are superior to the solutions produced when using the university's existing
manual system for allocation. We also include additional constraints taking into account the comments
made by the invigilators, which the current system fails to capture.

The model we present, we believe, accurately reflects the real-world problem, capturing various aspects
of the problem that have not been presented before. Moreover, the proposed approach adheres to all hard
constraints, which the university's current system fails to do.

OBJECTIVE

The primarily objective of this system is to develop a user friendly and time saving automated and
efficient allocation of invigilators. This is to reduce manual involvement and time taken by the
scheduling committee in developing a systematic approach in the preparation of invigilation schedules
that can capture the lecturers’ preference online.

With this in mind, the committee creates a centralized database for collecting information, and identifies
suitable software systems which facilitates the data processing process and supports the AIAS on-line.

Thus, the examination invigilation schedules can be optimized based on the preferences of lecturers and
the constraints faced.

SCOPE

This project has a large scope as it has the following features which help in making it easy to use,
understand and modify it :-

 The development of this system is significant as it is capable of minimizing the involvement and
time spent by the committee on the preparation of invigilation schedules.

 Besides, it ensures consistency, reliability and continuity in the invigilation schedules produced
in future semesters. The management of college through the Final Examination Unit in the
Academic Administration Office will then be able to have full control over the semester
examination.

 The lecturers’ preferences will be optimized with the constraints controlled,

 And the number of alterations made at the Examination Operation Room to the finalist of
invigilators will be greatly reduced.

 There are also universities where students are allowed to have their exams over web services.
And lastly, it is the possibility of being dominated by other dimensions of the exam scheduling
process that probably makes invigilator assignment less important, comparing to the complexity
of other dimensions of the problem.

METHODOLOGY

AIAS comprises the development of an online system for data collection and dissemination of assigned
invigilation duties, and a systematic approach in assigning duties. There are three important modules to
the online AIAS, and each of them is used in different stages of the scheduling process.
The main users of the system are invigilators and the administrator. Each user has access to the related
information. The administrator controls activities related to security (who has access to which data),
since he/she has access to the source code.

Appropriate data files have been created related to exams, time slots, and invigilators. Availabilities of
invigilators are incorporated in the system. Data are displayed in tables. The data handling sub-system
enables the user with pop-up menus to enter, modify, and display all the appropriate data in which he/she
has access. Interactions among the database, model, and users are enabled by web-based interfaces
constructed with Adobe Dreamweaver software. Data flow between interfaces and database is realized
by XML technology. Besides, MYSQL are used for the database transactions.

The three modules are:-

Module 1: Lecturer Identification

Module 1 is linked to a database which contains the latest name list of lecturers and their particulars
which will be used for identification purpose. The login page of this module requires the lecturer to
provide his user name and password for verification of his identity and authorization of his access to the
application. Both Modules 2 and 3 begin with this same identification process.

Module 2: Online Preferences Registration

The lecturers will be informed online once the final examinations timetable is uploaded onto the AIAS
web page. Then, they can register their preferred invigilation time slots.
There are five web pages for gathering information from lecturers.
Page 1 (Lecturer Identification) which displays the lecturer’s personal particulars will request the
lecturer to indicate if all his subjects are based on 100% coursework.
A ‘Yes’ answer will lead the lecturer to Page 2 (Preferred Working Day Selection) to begin the
selection process for his preferred time slots.
If the lecturer’s answer is ‘No’, he proceeds to Page 3 (Own Subject) where he provides information on
all the subjects he teaches, and their respective examination dates and time. After that, the lecturer will
be redirected to Page 2 to choose his preferred weekday time slots.
Once this is completed, the lecturer will proceed to Page 4 (Preferred Non-Working Day Selection)
where he chooses his preferred dates and time for non-working days which will include weekends and
anyone-working weekdays the examinations are held.
The lecturer indicates in a column whether the specific time slot chosen coincides with his own paper.
Invigilating on a non-working day is regarded as equivalent to invigilating twice on a working day, so
some lecturers prefer to invigilate on non-working day so that they can reduce the number of invigilation
duties by one weekday. In a case like this, the lecturer will have to indicate whether he chooses to
invigilate on that particular non-working day slot.
Page 5 (Comment page) allows the lecturer to include any comments.
While on Page 6; a summary of all the information entered is displayed. The system allows the lecturer
to edit or change any of the entries displayed on the summary page by clicking the ‘edit’ button, and the
only data that cannot be changed is the list of subjects he is lecturing. The system will automatically
display his entries for each page when he next logs in before the application process is closed.
After the specified period for applying for preferred invigilation slots expires, the system will be closed,
and the data will be extracted from the database of the online system for processing and assigning of
invigilation duties.

Module 3: Invigilation Schedule Retrieval

Once the invigilation schedule is prepared, the relevant information will be uploaded to Module 3 of
AIAS and then made accessible to all the lecturers. Upon successful login, the system will show a page
with instructions for the invigilators from the College Principal. The lecturer will click the “YES” button
at the bottom of the page to indicate that he has read the instructions and understood his responsibility.
The system will then lead the lecturer to the next page or else a pop-up message box will appear to
instruct him to read the instructions given, and the web page will be redirected to the Responsibilities of
Invigilators page. These instructions can be printed using a link provided on the top of the web page. On
the following page, the system will retrieve the individual summary of each lecturer’s invigilation duties
from the database using the user name in the login page for identification. Here, the lecturer can view
and print his individual invigilation schedule. This page also allows the lecturer to submit feedback to
the committee regarding his personal schedule.

TESTING TECHNOLOGY

Testing is the last stage of software development before we release the product. It is the process of
exercising or evaluating a system by manual or automatic means to verify that it satisfy that it satisfies
specified requirement or to identify difference between expected and actual result. It is also used to find
and eliminate any residual errors from previous stage and the operational reliability of the system.
Unit testing as well as integrated testing are carried out for this project.

Unit Testing

Unit testing is done on individual modules as they are completed and executable.

In unit testing on our project, each form is tested separately to insure that they are working properly.
Each form is tested to check whether they are connected to the database or not, the forms which are
meant for insertion are inserting the values in the database or have some errors in that, the deletion forms
are capable of deleting the values of the database or not. Similarly, we check the updating and searching
forms whether they are working properly or not.

Integration Testing

Though each program works

Individually they should work after linking together. This is also referred as interfacing. Integration
testing is the systematic technique for constructing the program structure while at the same time
conducting tests to uncover errors associated with interfacing. The objective is to take unit tested
modules and to build a program structure that has been dictated by design. In this testing the programs
were constructed and tested in small segments. Thus, the errors are easier to isolate. The performance
result to integration testing was also successful.

Testing of Login Forms

This form is used for log in by the administrator and lecturers. In this user have to enter his user id and
password if both are correct than junction form will open otherwise one error (“enter correct id and
password”) will come.

Log in form contain two text boxes one for id and other for password. Both have data type varchar so if
we entered any other than this data type then error message will come and we would not get our expected
output. So for the expected output both boxes should be filled with character of data type varchar.

If we fill the boxes with some integer then at the time of debugging of project in coding error will show
that integer cannot be change into character because both user id and password have the data type
varchar in the definition of table at time of designing.

Testing of Insertion Forms

This form is used by the admin and lecturers to insert the data in the database. There are separate
insertion forms for inserting data of invigilators. Each attribute has its own data type. For example
first_name has varchar, and exam_date has datetime as its datatype. When the entries are made in such a
way that they do not matches with the datatype then error occurs.

If we fill the boxes with required data type then we get our expected output. So our searching form is
running and we are getting our expected output.

Testing with Artificial Data

Artificial data is used especially for running the first test on taking random data from ourselves. The data
should contain all possible combination of formats and values that we want the system should go through
its phases. The artificial data should include deliberate mistakes, such as number occurring in an alphabet
input field where a program expects a name. These mistakes help us to check the system’s editing, error
and error correction procedure.

Testing with Live Data

Once the system performs flawlessly on artificially data, we switch to live data or real data taken from
the organization.

The proposed system is tested with data provided by Kalindi College, University Of Delhi. The
academic year in the college consists two timeslots i.e. Morning and Evening. The exam schedule is
partially predetermined by the dean office by assigning the common courses of the departments to some
specific time slots. Then each department schedules the rest of its courses by using the available time
slots left. Once the final exam schedule is determined, the departments assign their invigilators to exams.
The university uses its own teaching assistants to invigilate and it is highly desirable to have a schedule
that is fair to them and does not affect their other academic responsibilities. The system under
consideration has 13 teaching assistants who also serve as the invigilators during the exams. We classify
these teaching assistants into two groups according to their level of experience. It is seen that the
invigilators are not satisfied with their current assignments and they would like to swap their duty and
see more work being done on improving the gaps between invigilation duties

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

The following are the minimum computer hardware requirements for effective running of the
Web-application:
 A full computer system (keyboard, mouse and monitor)
 Minimum of 512MB RAM
 Minimum of 4GB hard disk size
  Minimum of 1.60GHz Processor speed
 An Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS)
 A stabilizer

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

For this web-application to function efficiently, the following software needs to be running on
 the computer system:
 A Web-Server(Apache server) on the local computer
 A web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc)
 Relational Database Management System (RDBMS): MySQL
 Adobe Dreamweaver

REFERENCES

www.google.com

www.scribd.com

https://projectideasincse.wordpress.com

https://www.researchgate.net