A secure online quiz system

Abstract

Online Quiz assessment is becoming widely popular as an academic tool, mainly because of the didactic nature and inexpensive means to test students. In order to keep the online assessments fair, any sort of malpractice employed by students needs to be tackled. Although this can be solved using complex plagiarism detection algorithms, the assessment tools majorly rely on dynamic creation of unique assessment for each student, which is as good as the former method.

The aim of the Final Year Project is to design and develop a web-based and secure Online Quiz System (OQS) using one of the python’s latest frameworks, flask that targets the following functions:

1. Ability to test students based on four different types of questions, i.e. Multiple Choice, Multiple Choice Multiple Response, Fill-in-the-blank and Short Answer that support parameterized images in the question description 2. Single Page View, minimalistic, and professional looking User Interface that reduces any scope of errors and minimizes the time to learn the system by a new user. 3. Prevention of cheating by making use of a secure browser and employing more secure technologies to host the Quiz for students.

At the end of the project, a prototype was developed that meets all the necessary design and functional requirements. The web application is built on Flask Stack (Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, Flask(Python)) as part of Client-Server Architecture. The process of development went through all the steps of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) that mainly consists of requirement analysis, designing database of 10 tables, UI design, implementing back-end and front-end functions and black-box testing of the Web Application. Results shows OQS’s capacity as a reliable and effective assessment tool.