Overview

Pareeksha is a complete examination management system that aids to simplify an organization’s assessment needs in a simple, structured, and secure manner. It provides powerful tools to create, manage, administrate and reuse exams. A web-based application, it can create, edit, and delete different types of questions.

Business Need

Nowadays, conducting an examination in the conventional way is a cumbersome and time consuming process. Making question papers, fixing schedules, processing answer sheets, evaluating answers and tabulating the results are the regular processes involved in examinations. This is where Pareeksha comes to your aid. This software can be used to conduct examinations in any schools, colleges or organizations in an easy manner. Evaluation of answer sheets is a difficult task when the number of examinees is high, especially so in a time-bound process. Pareeksha simplifies the whole thing. As soon as an examinee is through with an exam, the results are shown as well as stored in database for later reference. The current design is a product of preliminary discussions of use cases and desired features. Further functionalities can be added to future releases. Additional features can also be incorporated based on individual customer requirements.

Key Challenges

Dynamic generation of question paper using XML/XSLT was the major challenge. Generation of reports in Excel format and implementation of schedulers for sending automatic reports were also the major difficult requirements for the project.

Approach

Pareeksha is tool developed as a replacement for the conventional examination methods. It enables the trainer to create and distribute questions. Pareeksha also facilitates the conduct of exams through the web with more ease, less probability of tampering, and more transparency. Pareeksha is a platform where the candidates are able to take the test in a place and time as per their convenience with lots of ease instead of controlled atmospheres and strict timings. It can be used for educational and organizing purposes as well. Pareeksha supports different modes of questions.

Some of the features are:

• Multiple Question Type support
• Question Set Library
• Multiple Language support
• Exam Groups
• Easy Customizability
• E-mail Notifications
• Print Question Papers
• Remote Examinations
• Internet Readiness
• Platform Independence

Technology

• Eclipse Europa
• Java 1.5
• Struts 1.2
• MySQL

Solutions

This software provides an easy-to-use GUI to create courses, questions, question sets and to conduct examinations. There can be four types of users in this system - Admin, Trainer, Trainee and Temporary Trainee. Each type of user has restricted access to the functionalities according to the user type.

The system has a provision to upload a file with instructions for the examination. This will be shown to the examinee prior to commencement of an exam. The system also provides a feature to add questions to database which are stored in an XML file in a specified format. Pareeksha has successfully implemented XML/XSLT, different question types and exam schedules.

Client Gain

Pareeksha is an in-house product of PIT Solutions and is listed in Sourceforge and Freshmeat communities. Clients are using this application in their various portals as it is very flexible. Pareeksha taps the potential benefits of leveraging technology to deliver online exams. Transparency of processes and convenience are the main benefits perceived by clients.