Working of the Online Examination System in PHP and MySQL with Trends Graphs

   Here I will give you a brief idea of the working of the Online Examination System developed in MySQL and PHP for a leading Maritime Academy located in Goa, India.
   After a student has selected the proper question question paper and logged in, he will be presented the question paper. The total questions asked in the paper will be fixed for a particular Course paper. For a partly static system, the total questions that should be in the paper has to be specified at the time of designing the system. In case of a fully dynamic examination system the System Administrator can enter as well as edit the question and answers as well as set a large number of parameters of the exam including the number of questions of the course paper, the number of sets of questions and a few more. Further details regarding the various options in this regard are given in Online Examination - Design Considerations and Customisation Options
    Normally any exam has 50 or 100 questions in the paper. The examination consists of different types of multiple choice questions. The questions are selected at random keeping the proper weightage for the various topics. I will make it clear with an example of a Maritime Academy Paper. The "Safe Working Practices" exam for the General Purpose Course has 50 questions in all. For the purpose of randomisation it is split into 10 sections each of 5 questions each. (5 *10 = 50 questions). Each section has 10 sets of questions.
   Now if you wish to randomise as is done in most of the cases to prevent malpractices, a student can get Set 1 of the first section, Set 10 of the second, Set 7 of the third, Set 2 of the fourth and so on. Of course, all the Sets of a particular question will cover the same topics and will have the same level of difficulty. The total questions required would be 50 * 10 =500 questions and the number of sets settings would be 10. i.e for each section the number of sets available for the computer to choose would be 10 and it would choose any one of them at random as explained earlier.
     The answers are evaluated instantly by the software on submission and the marks obtained for each along with the answer given by the student are stored in the database.The examiner can get the results immediately in various forms. In order to get the results the administrator has to login as there is Password based access for Individual Answer Sheet, General Mark Lists and Trends Graphs. Authentication is provided Via Sessions and the password is stored in encrypted form (MD5 hash) in the database.