SAFE (Smart Authenticated Fast Exams) is a smart-phone app based system to conduct easy online-exams in proctored venues. Today, smart-phones or other electronic devices are explicitly disallowed in exam venues, due to the obvious possibilities of misuse for cheating. SAFE brings the smart-phone revolution into the exam hall. It is based on a BYOD (bring your own device) model that leverages student smart-phones to conduct auto-graded, and cheating-free exams in a proctored exam room setting.SAFE has 3 components: a smart-n phone app, a web server and WiFi infrastructure to enable app-server communication. SAFE support a rich set of features to handle various types of question papers as well as instructor preferences. In the design of SAFE, we set to achieve 4 goals: easy setup, cheating-
free operation, robustness and scale. Easy setup is achieved predominantly due to the BYOD model and online mode of exams. Cheating is prevented via locking the app for the intended purpose along with reporting to the server any user attempts at cheating. Robustness is handled via periodic syncing of messages and careful consideration of corner cases.Scale is handled by carefully tuning the WiFi as well as via application level scheduling.SAFE has been used so far to conduct 150+ in-class quizzes in 14 IIT Bombay courses in the last two years. It was also used to conduct a high stake admission test for a Master’s program in Computer Science. It has been used to conduct sessional exams at GHRCE, Nagpur. The feedback from end-users has been very positive and we continue to get new requests for trials in other settings.
Aside from class-room exams, SAFE can be used for:
■ Certification exams
■ Pre-interview screening
■ Quick poll/survey/feedback in presentations
■ Large-scale objective competitive exams
■ Conducting largely paper-free subjective exams (e.g. University exams)
If you wish to try SAFE for your exams, do contact us: http://safe.cse.iitb.ac.in/