Online Exam Marking System

Nadeeshani. Mulleriyawa Udara P.Berandeniya Chathuri.J. Malavipathi K.D.Imeshke. Jayaratne Mevan.G. Dharmarathna : nmulleriyawa@gmail.com : priyadarshanie@gmail.com : chathu_1213@yahoo.com : imeshke.jaya@gmail.com : mevan_dh@yahoo.com

Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology

Abstract
This paper describes an automated system to mark student programs. The main objective of this document is to give the reader a consistent and complete insight to all aspects of the system. It also includes all details on research fields as well as a detailed description on the planning, design, development and functionalities of the entire Online Exam Marking System. Online Exam Marking System (OEMS) is a computer based assessment system. This system would provide an environment in marking java programs according to the criteria and the solutions provided by the examiner. Working from literature and interviews, we will describe OEMS technology, its use in IT educational industry, and its impact on lecturers, instructors and students. The Online Exam Marking System adheres to the efficiency, reliability, security, and user friendliness. The main potential outcome of this project is as mentioned earlier; to overcome the problems arise in marking the online exams. This system provides an interface to mark java programs according to general criteria and the solutions provided by the examiner.The above concepts and the features that OEMS provides are examined in detail. The implementation issues are also discussed with conclusion.

Keywords: Java, Online Exam Marking, Object Oriented

1. Introduction
The Online Exam Marking System is the product which is to be developed for the project through out this research work. With the development of the Information Technology, a competitive environment has being created to learn and use Programming Languages like Java, C, C++, VB, .NET, etc. When we have online exams for programming languages in a university environment, it is more convenient to use an automated marking system like Online Exam Marking System than the traditional way. So the overall purpose of this Project is to make the examiners or the instructors check the student answers easily and accurately and reduce the time taken. Our objective is to make out an appropriate way that can use in marking written programs. There are applications that are widely used to mark student programs. But often these are lack user interactions. And lead to number of inaccurate grades. The information is that examiners are finding online marking quite tough. Students are not able to annotate the scripts by hand, there's a time constraint and you can't take into account youngsters who do quite a lot of writing and don't fill in the standard box that online marking demands. The use of technology should not diminish the professionalism of teachers in the exam process. We are about making sure assessment is good - that it's properly done, it's properly checked, it's properly supervised and actually technology should make that easier. The main goal of the Online Exam Marking System is to research and develop an application to reduce the work load of the Examiners/Instructors/Lecturers and provide an easy way of marking written java programs, which can be used in online exams. This OEMS Application will minimize the time taken for marking programs by providing a 2

user friendly interface for the end user. The overall description covers all the characteristics including functional requirements, design constraints, use cases and etc. To overcome such difficulties Our Online Exam Marking System (OEMS) will be helpful. According to our reviews when studying about similar areas that have done before, we found some available marking tools used for marking systems. Most currently used Online Exam Marking Systems based on programming use software assessment tools. Course Master
[2] [1]

(CM)
[1]

is a Computer Based Assessment (CBA) system

. CM provides for the marking of Java and C++

programs, Object Oriented (OO) languages and design, flowcharts and logical circuits. This system contains some few tools named Typographic, Dynamic and Feature Tools. The rest of the tools are used to assess student solutions in their respective domains. In Modern days, Live Teaching Concept is one of the most widely used methods of teaching. By using this concept the developers can bring the virtual classroom into the real-time screen of the lecturers computer. They can send lecturers voice, video and desktop to the desktop of the students computer wherever they are anywhere in the world. Live Teaching System builders main target is to transmit voice data, video data and desktop data from one end to the other end without losing any information and resolution of the desktop. Systems like WebCT
[9]

(WebCT 2002) provide a range of question types, such as, multiple-choice, matching, and calculated etc. web-based Automated Essay Marking System
[7]

is another kind of marking system which is used

to assess student essays for historical Malay text using nearest-neighbor technique. By identifying limitation of these tools and systems we are going to provide fully developed system.

With the OEMS technology, it will result in IT educational industry, especially in the institutions and the impact on lecturers, instructors and students .Therefore our aim is to use OEMS in IT education industry. In order to come up with such a system we have used and tested some techniques. When continuing this task we have to face a problem. That is we are using only few simple programs to test the system. It may be not 100% compatible with complex programs. Finding the algorithm of comparing and mark allocating is very critical when we doing this research. Since the scope of marking online exams written using a language like java has spread through out a large area.

that the prototype provides enough functionality to be installed and used in the project. When prototype is installed called rough model of system, refinement occurs until it is accept as the new system.

Correct Source Code

Lecturer / Instructor Students Source Code

Read, Simplify, Compare Codes and Calculate Marks

Figure 1: System Diagram

Display Marks

2. Research Methodology
The Object Oriented Model attempts to balance the focus between process and data by incorporating both into one model. So we will able to use Object Oriented Model as our approach for Online Exam Marking System (OEMS) since our marking system can use only for Java (Java is an Object Oriented language). According to the RAD methodologies, we decided to use prototyping methodology
[Figure 1]

3. Research Findings
These are the Research Findings which we have identified during our research project. Decrease the time taken to mark the students java programs. Provide real-time response Platform Independent System Provide an efficient, reliable, accurate, secure and user friendly system. Reduce the paper based work Decrease the mistakes of marking the students java programs

as

our research project methodology. Because the reason is, this methodology is integrated with system prototype and the prototyping development. It performs the analysis, design and Implementation phases concurrently, and all three phases are performed repeatedly in a cycle until the system completed. The first prototype is usually the first part of the system that the user will use. This is shown to the user and the project sponsor, who provide comments which are used to reanalyze, redesign and implement a second prototype that provides few more features. This process continues in a cycle until the analysts, users and sponsor agree 3

4. Results And Discussion

The progressions of the achievement objectives of this project are going to prove by analyzing objective the quantitative to and qualitative are about measurements. Quantitative measurements understand

measurements

unknown criteria. Qualitative measurements are the subjective measurements that depend on the person. The quality and the accuracy of the system

are concerned in order to ensure the performance. Apart from that speed, cost, reliability availability product. We will develop this system to automate the tasks of lectures or examiners. In order to perform those requirements we generate a source code to compare the student answers with the lectures marking scheme. There we faced some problems regarding the scope of ways which can be written using language java. Therefore we limited the scope to ways in a manner that can be used for checking the looping skills of the programs. We had to reduce the programs to be checked to a way that is not much complex and havent used any mathematical formulas. We have enough memory to load the source codes. So that will not cause to a time consume. The two source codes can easily be simplified and stored in a disk. Then the simplified source codes have to be checked.
[6] [5]

incorrect/false/minus marks for the students java programs that can be correct but not identical to the given solution. With OEMS, we supply the solution for the above scenario. Our research; OEMS will support in marking different programming solutions rather than comparing the solutions with a given correct answer.

and
[8]

, security

[7]

and maintainability

of

the system prove the best performance of the

6. References
[1] Colin Higgins, Pavlos Symeonidis, archive, Athanasios Tsintsifas, Source ACM SIGCSE Bulletin http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm? doid=637610.544431 Pages: 46 - 50, Year of Publication: 2002 [2] Nghi Truong, Paul Roe, Peter Bancroft, Static Analysis of Students Java Programs, http://www.crpit.com/confpapers/CRPITV30 Truong.pdf [3] Prof. Michael Goedicke,Dipl. Wirt.-Inf. Carsten Kllmann, Automation of Java Code Analysis for Programming Exercises, http://www.zfh.uni-duisburgessen.de/files/Goedicke_Programmierumgeb ung.pdf [4] Pattern Matching, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_matchi ng [5] Jiantao Pan, Software Reliability http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/des_s99/sw_re liability/ [6] PCMag, Availability http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542, t=availabilityandi=38290,00.asp

5. Conclusion And Future Works

Online Exam Marking System (OEMS) was designed with the scope of reducing the work load of the examiners/instructors/Lecturers and providing an easy way of marking written java programs, which can be used in online exams. Online Exam Marking System (OEMS) will ensure efficiency, security, accuracy, reliability and will minimize the time taken for marking programs by providing a user friendly interface for the end user. OEMS can assess online java assignments of the students. There can be different programming solutions to one given problem. Existing marking systems which use to mark online java programs do not support for marking different programming solutions. They compare all students answers with one given correct answer. scenario, the system will In that award 4

[7] Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, Computer Security http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Softwar e+security [8] Business Dictionary, Software

Maintainability http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/soft ware-maintainability.html [9] Barbara Lewis, Software Compare and Contrast: Blackboard, WebCT and Lotus Notes a Panel ceedings/papers/lewis167softw.pdf [10] John R. Levine, Tony Mason, Doug Brown, Lex and Yacc, Paperback - 2nd/updated edition, O'Reilly and Associates (October 1992) [11] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Java (programming language) , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(program ming_language) [12] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, NetBeans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBeans , Discussion, http://informingscience.org/proceedings/IS2002Pro