Vishal Tyagi
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Campus Tooling·shipped

Campus Exam Portal

Built Campus Quest, a campus examination portal with per-session question/option permutation, focus-loss integrity signals, and bulk question-bank ingestion for faculty.

Date2024-06
Reading TimeN/A
Statusshipped
StackPython, SQL, REST APIs

Per-session seeded permutation

Integrity model

[High Confidence]

Bulk CSV/JSON question bank import

Faculty tooling

[High Confidence]

What it does

Static digital exams make collusion easy: every candidate sees the same order. Faculty also spent too long formatting banks and grading MCQs by hand.

Campus Quest issues a session seed, permutes questions and options per candidate, monitors focus-loss / tab events with configurable thresholds, and grades against a canonical key after mapping permutations back.

Constraints

  • Burst login load when an exam slot opens
  • Unique paper per session without breaking grading keys
  • Usable latency on campus Wi-Fi
  • Faculty need bulk bank import and automated reports

Decisions & tradeoffs

  1. Seeded on-the-fly permutation instead of pre-generating thousands of static papers
  2. Integrity monitor that can reshuffle when anomaly thresholds trip
  3. Signed session tokens carrying seed/state to reduce live DB lookups mid-exam
  4. CSV/JSON bank parsers with schema checks for faculty prep
flowchart TD
  CandidateAuth[Candidate Login] --> TokenGen[Session Token plus Seed]
  TokenGen --> PermutationEngine[Seeded Question Permutations]
  PermutationEngine --> ExamUI[Active Exam Interface]
  ExamUI --> IntegrityMonitor{Focus / Session Check}
  IntegrityMonitor -->|Nominal| NormalFlow[Permuted Sequence]
  IntegrityMonitor -->|Anomaly| Shuffle[Anti-Tamper Reshuffle]
  NormalFlow --> AnswerQueue[Response Submission]
  Shuffle --> AnswerQueue

Tradeoffs: on-the-fly permutation saves storage and costs CPU at render time. Aggressive anti-cheat creates false positives — thresholds are configurable for that reason.

What it demonstrates

  • Designing for concurrent campus exam load
  • Integrity controls that stay explainable (seeds + rules, not black-box scoring)
  • Admin tooling that shortens faculty prep time