Sci Eng Ethics DOI 10.1007/s11948-017-9889-z LETTER
An Online Lab Examination Management System (OLEMS) to Avoid Malpractice Manjur Kolhar1 • Abdalla Alameen1 Zakaria Mokhtar Gharsseldien2,3
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Received: 3 February 2017 / Accepted: 13 February 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract Examination and evaluation are two important phases of education at any level of a student’s curriculum. However, these assessment processes are problematic in the sense that they encourage learners to devise ways to be dishonest. The traditional way of conducting exams is particularly conducive to dishonesty. In view of this, this letter proposes an online lab examination management system to prevent misconduct and to secure the process of lab examination. Keywords Access control Secured online exam engine Dishonesty prevention
Introduction Many online examination systems have been proposed to address the matter of student dishonesty during online laboratory examinations; however, these systems have limitations, such as that they allow the use of Bluetooth communication, which can be exploited for reasons of misconduct during exams. In addition, students may be allowed to take the exams from home, in which case the student might download course content when answering online exam questions. Some students may even suppress firewalls using advanced VPN technologies (Kaiiali et al. 2016).
& Manjur Kolhar
[email protected] 1
Department of Computer Science, Wadi College of Arts, and Science, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Wadi Ad Dawaser 11991, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
2
Department of Mathematics, Wadi College of Arts, and Science, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Wadi Ad Dawaser 11991, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
3
Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Al-Azhar University, Nasr City, Cairo 11884, Egypt
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Literature Review A plethora of online examination systems with the ability to overcome dishonesty have been proposed (Kaiiali et al. 2016; Abdul et al. 2015; Jung and Yeom 2009), yet very few of them have made advances toward securing the process of examination. Furthermore, they are mainly designed for mathematics or English exams in middle or high school (Abdul et al. 2015). Jung and Yeom (2009) have suggested the use of a mobile-based system to attend exams.
Proposed System The aforementioned issues prompted us to propose an online lab examination management system (OLEMS), which is a secured online system that prevents student malpractice during exams. OLEMS divides questions into different categories, such as multiple choice, descriptive questions, and practical programming-based questions. OLEMS site will remain operational for 2 h and requires invigilator. OLEMS consists of two modules: the first is for securing the process of examination, and the other is a process designed to prevent dishonesty. The process of examination is secured by employing network transportation layered architecture between the server (OLEMS) and the client (student) by means of a secured hypertext transfer protocol. We enhance communication security by also utilizing a transport-level security protocol, which aims predominantly to provide privacy and examination data integrity between the student computer and OLEMS server. Initially, the student computer sends a ‘‘hello’’ data packet to OLEMS, whereupon OLEMS requests a certificate. Then the client replies with the certificate and finally OLEMS validates the certificate, following which only examination data will be secured through the secured socket layer (SSL). In terms of the examination itself, OLEMS generates dissimilar questions for the lab exams to prevent students from using unethical ways to exchange information (i.e., cheating) within the examination room. In the case of multiple choice-based questions, the answers are changed for each of the students. This considers the chance that a student could participate in the exam from home or from a nearby college campus or from a venue on campus other than the designated exam venue, from where it would be possible to use dishonest means when answering the questions (Jung and Yeom 2009). We addressed this issue by developing an algorithm that only gives those students who are present in the examination hall access to the questions. Students are authenticated by using an AAA (authentication, authorization, and accounting) radius server along with the open source Chillispot Captive Portal. These servers provide authentication and accounting modules for students who are attending the examination in the designated examination hall only. Furthermore, the sitting arrangement is also considered a crucial aspect of the system intended to avoid malpractice. Based on the physical sitting arrangement, our server can easily identify the neighbor of any given student present in the examination hall with the help of the machine access controller address and the IP
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address. This enabled us to design the algorithm such that it generates the questions for the lab exam in a way that a particular student and their immediate neighbors are not posed the same question at the same stage in the exam.
Evaluation Participants’ interest in OLEMS was evaluated with the aid of surveys, which were prepared and analyzed by means of Google Docs. The results showed that OLEMS is suitable for integration with any learning system. However, our system would need to be verified for robustness against additional threatening bots. Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of interest None.
References Abdul, W., Sengoku, Y. & Mambo, M. (2015). Toward constructing a secure online examination system. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on ubiquitous information management and communication. ACM, 2015. Jung, I. Y., & Yeom, H. Y. (2009). Enhanced security for online exams using group cryptography. IEEE Transactions on Education, 52(3), 340–349. Kaiiali, M., Ozkaya, A., Altun, H., Haddad, H., & Alier, M. (2016). Designing a secure exam management system (SEMS) for M-learning environments. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 9(3), 258–271.
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