Design And Implementation Of Exam Database Management And Grading System

With the rapid development in economics, employers are putting higher and higher requirement for potential employees. Thus, our government introduced various types of professional certifications. Usually, examinations for these certifications adopted the traditional method which is also widely used in universities. It generally consists of the following four steps: designing the exams by professionals, conduct the testing, mark the exams by some markers, and finally process and analyze the results. Apparently, with the growing demands for examinations, the traditional procedure will increase the workload of exam designers and markers, and as a result they will have less time for other commitments, such as research and teaching. Moreover, it is difficult to maintain a standard marking scheme, since most of the times the exams are marked by several individuals. This will bring lots of fairness issues, which are very essential in examinations. Therefore, the traditional method cannot meet the needs of modern examinations.Exam database is introduced for designing and conducting large number of examinations. It is a new approach in education; it plays an essential and fundamental role in developing education via information technologies; and it is a good utility for evaluating the results of teaching. Based on some educational theories, Exam database is designed to be a collection of questions in some disciplines and stored in some computer database. It is a software system that is able to manage all the questions, design exams, and analyze examination results. Instructors can conveniently organize the questions in the database, efficiently design several different copies of exams according to some specific requirements, analyze the results of the examination, and provide conclusive reports. The exams designed by the system can avoid the unnecessary repetition of some questions in different exams, keep a consistent marking scheme, maintain a similar workload in different exams, obtain exams in a reasonable structure, and cover the knowledge in a comprehensive scope.The users can not only efficiently and conveniently design exams by using the exam database, but also manage the exam database by using its functions such that inserting some new questions into the database, editing existing questions, deleting some questions from the database, browsing the questions in the database. The system also has the functions that analyze the questions in the designed exams or the database, and provide some conclusive reports based on the types, marks, and difficulties of the questions. At the same time of using the system, the users can obtain some necessary analysis results and information. Both students and instructors can be benefited from the system. Students can access the system through the internet and take some practice exams to improve their understanding of the materials necessary for their examinations. On the other hand, instructors can work together to design exams via the online system, and save a lot of time. Another important advantage of the system is that instructors and students can communicate via the system, which represents the concepts of learning via information technology and self-education. Thus, the system is a good platform for instructors and students outside classrooms. Currently, some universities have already implemented exam databases that are operated and administrated via computer systems. However, most of them are designed for a single discipline, and based on fixed exams. The new trend, in computer based exam database system, is to automatically design exams for different subjects or different level of difficulties by automatically or semi-automatically choosing questions. Implementing internet based exam database system is a fundamental and necessary step for applying information technologies in education. Based on the analysis on some basic functionality, architecture, and developing environments of internet based exam database system, some models were proposed, whose purpose is to semi-automatically or automatically design exams, and provide some tools, if necessary, to analyze and evaluate the designed exams. Examinations are important in education. They are not only used for evaluating students but also for evaluating the quality of teaching. For the sake of fairness and correctness, the design of exams should be standardized. The traditional procedure for designing exams is under the constraints of many factors such as limited time, space, and administration and service recourses. Hence, it is not suitable for the modernized education via information technologies. Our approach overcomes the constraints by implementing an online examination and exam databaseadministration system which applies a popular technology: Struts+Hibernate+Spring. It is based on a simple B/S architecture, and applies the functionalities in SQL2000 for operating database. The system can be used for any course, and accessed by both instructors and students. In this paper, we apply some technologies and methods for developing information administration systems, and use the programming language Java and the administration system for Mysql to develop an exam database system. We introduce the development procedure of the system, including pre-application investigation, analysis of the system, design of the system, and the details in the development. Also, we will mention the major problems we encountered in the development and the solutions to the problems.