Examination Center and Staff Allocation System for Examinations Department of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Examination is the main way of testing and evaluating the performance of students. In Sri Lanka, the Department of Examinations (DOE) is the body, which is authorized by an act of parliament to conduct all public examinations. DOE was established in 1961 in order to organize and conduct national examinations in the country. DOE conducts major national examinations and also acts as a Sri Lanka agent for the foreign examinations. An examination has three major processes namely, organizing of the exams, implementing of the examination, post examination procedures. Our system was designed to help the foremost procedure, the organizing part of the exam. It was used for recruiting of the necessary staff (supervisors and assistant supervisors) and necessary venues (exam centers and coordinating centers) based on the requirements on each zone. Organizing an examination include activities like appointing personnel for administration of the examination, namely coordinating officers, assistant coordinating officers, exam supervisors and assistant supervisors and arranging suitable venues for examination centers and coordinating centers. While organizing these examinations, the DOE currently employs a manual system to arrange examination centers and recruit thousands of personnel to administer these examinations countrywide. The proposed system for DOE was supposed to replace the manual system with an automated system. Additionally this system also provided some reporting tools for analysis. The proposed system was a web based solution. Which was been developed under the Rational Unified Process (RUP) framework which supports object orientation. This system was developed using most cutting edge, free and open source technologies. Hypertext Pre-Processor (PHP) was used as the server side programming language. Apache httpd server was used as the webserver. My Structured Query Language (MySQL) was used as the database management system. Supportive tools like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and JQuery was also used in this project. Software ideas modeler was used to draw the Unified Modelling Language (UML) illustrations. This system was methodically analyzed, designed, implemented and thoroughly tested. This system fulfilled the needs of its client and the end users. And was considered a successful project by the client.