Abstract
Universities and other educational organizations are adopting computer-based assessment tools (herein called e-exams) to reach larger and ubiquitous audiences. While this makes examination tests more accessible, it exposes them to unprecedented threats not only from candidates but also from authorities, which organize exams and deliver marks. Thus, e-exams must be checked to detect potential irregularities. In this paper, we propose several monitors, expressed as Quantified Event Automata (QEA), to monitor the main properties of e-exams. Then, we implement the monitors using MarQ, a recent Java tool designed to support QEAs. Finally, we apply our monitors to logged data from real e-exams conducted by Université Joseph Fourier at pharmacy faculty, as a part of Epreuves Classantes Nationales informatisées, a pioneering project which aims to realize all french medicine exams electronically by 2016. Our monitors found discrepancies between the specification and the implementation.
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Notes
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The project is called Épreuves Classantes Nationales informatisées, see www.side-sante.org.
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We have also designed an event-based behavioral model of the e-exam phases that is not reported in this paper for space reasons. The description was obtained and validated through discussions with the engineers at THEIA.
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank François Géronimi from THEIA, Daniel Pagonis from TIMC-IMAG, and Olivier Palombi from LJK for providing us with a description of e-exam software system, for sharing with us the logs of some real french e-exams, and for validating and discussing the properties presented in this paper. The authors also thank Giles Reger for providing us with help on using MarQ. The authors also would like to thank the “Digital trust” Chair from the University of Auvergne Foundation for the support provided to conduct this research. This work has been partly done in the context of the ICT COST Action IC1402 Runtime Verification beyond Monitoring (ARVI).
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Kassem, A., Falcone, Y., Lafourcade, P. (2015). Monitoring Electronic Exams. In: Bartocci, E., Majumdar, R. (eds) Runtime Verification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9333. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23820-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23820-3_8
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