University Testing Center - Problem Description

The purpose of University Testing Center is to provide test registration and administration services for students and faculty nationwide. Sites are located across the country, and one site is located on the main campus of the University.

Mission Statement of University Testing Center:

The University Testing Center strives to ensure that all tests are administered under standardized conditions that are efficient, fair, and secure, while providing examinees with the utmost level of student-friendly service that allows each the opportunity to demonstrate his/her ability and provide comparable results.

Faculty members can submit exams to the testing center, to be given to students. The examinations are currently hand-delivered to the testing center, on paper. The tests must be kept secure so they can only be seen during the time they are available and only by the students who have registered to take each exam.

Students can register for exams/tests through telephone or Internet. Once the registration process for an examination is completed, the test administration staff identifies the list of examinees for a particular test day and makes necessary arrangements for administering the tests for that day. Distance students can take the exams at test centers located near where they live.

The University Testing Center needs to provide information about various tests and the test dates to the students. The testing center is also responsible for notifying students about any change in a test schedule.

Process:

1. Students can register for a test by phone or by going to the testing center website. In each case, there is a procedure for verifying that person registering is enrolled in the course to which the examination belongs. By default, the examination is scheduled for the on-campus testing center. However, distance students may select a location from a list of remote testing centers.
2. Under the current system, on the test day, the test center staff generates an exam schedule report from their website. They then merge this report with hand-written registration data collected through phone calls, into one single document. This document contains details about all examinees for a particular test date. This manual merging process is tedious and is time consuming. The new system should provide a better solution.
3. Once the test is over, the testing center needs to send a report to the professor telling who took the exam. The report is delivered to the professor along with the papers on which the students have answered the questions. The professor then grades the papers. The test center staff members currently hand-generate these reports. They would like to automate the generation of this report.
4. At present the testing center is using a website provided by a company called Zappo-Serve for the test registration process. They would rather do this in-house and have the functionality on their own web site.
5. For distance students, the testing center faxes a of the exam to the other testing center. There is interest in handling this transfer over the Internet, but it will need to maintain the same level of security as if the exam were faxed to the testing center.
6. To speed up the return of exams taken remotely, the the remote testing centers are currently scanning and faxing the student answers back to the main university testing center, and also shipping the original papers as back-up. At this point the center is not yet ready to deal with the technical complications of an all-electronic test administration system, but they are interested in the possibility of using Internet transmission in place of fax for the return of the student answers.