Design And Implementation Of A C/S Based Self-taught Examination Paper Management System

Since the establishment of the National Steering Committee on Self-taught Higher Education Examination in 1983, Self-taught Examination organizations at various levels have been established. Self-taught Examination System is well received and welcomed due to its advantages as an open, flexible and low cost system. Making and management of the examination papers plays a major part in standardization of the Self-taught Examinations, and it is a core part of Self-taught Examination quality assurance system. Mistakes in the examination paper management can lead to serious consequences. As a recent example that in one province in China, due to errors in the printed papers, the examination had to be postponed. Therefore, ensuring proper test-setting and examination paper management is of great significance in guaranteeing Self-taught Examination quality.After years of development, the Self-taught Examination management has transformed to base on electronic methods. However, as the examination papers accumulate and the number of examination courses increase, the amount of data increases enormously and to manage such data has become very troublesome and inefficient without a specialist software system's support. It is apparent that the traditional management methods of the papers can not meet the demands of modern examinations. It's time to search for a new solution and develop a corresponding software system that can adapt to the modern examination paper management requirements.This article proceeds from actual practice of a provincial Self-taught Examination Centre, analyzed and researched the difficulties in the current setup, and continued to develop an examination paper management system. The main work is as follows:(1) Based on the practice of the Self-taught Examination Centre, analyzed the main problems of the current setup, collected basic requirements for the examination paper management system.(2) Through the analysis and comparison of the architecture styles of software systems, decided to use a three-tier Client/Server architecture for the examination paper management system, and carried out detailed analysis and design of the main function modules with special emphases on user access control method and workflow management.(3) According to the software engineering technology, built the system model using Object-Oriented techniques and the Unified Modeling Language, and implemented the system with Visual C++ and SQL Server 2000.