A real-time collaborative tool that helps university lecture teams to correct exams efficiently. It is a feature-rich application designed to simplify and enhance the exam grading process. With its modern tech stack and comprehensive real-time functionality, it provides a seamless experience for faculty, tutors and administrators. This blog post will provide an overview of the features, technologies used, and other relevant details about this powerful tool designed to assist with exam grading.
Motivation
Each semester, I supervise a team of over 10 tutors and staff who help correct the exams. Copying ratings from each exam after the correction is finished is very time-consuming, so we adopted an approach where each person can enter their ratings themselves. Why don't we just use a shared spreadsheet like Google Sheets? Well, this conflicts with LMU Munich’s data regulations, and manually typing in ratings is very error-prone (like assigning higher scores than the maximum). Moreover, spreadsheets lack a clear monitoring view to track overall progress in real-time. To solve these issues, I developed this real-time collaborative exam correction tool.
Features
The real-time collaborative exam correction tool offers a comprehensive set of features to streamline
the exam grading process:
- User Authentication and Authorization: Secure login and role-based access control to ensure that only authorized users can access specific functionalities.
- Exam Creation and Management: Create and manage exams, including configuring assignments, elective tasks, and grade keys.
- Participant Ingestion: Easily upload and manage exam participants using .xlsx files.
- Assignment and Submission Management: View, modify, and grade assignments and submissions. Real-time updates ensure that all changes are immediately reflected.
- Statistics and Overview: Generate detailed statistics and overviews of exam performance and current progress, including assignment averages and grade distributions.
- Admin Panel: A dedicated admin panel for managing users, updating passwords, and overseeing exams.
Technologies
The real-time collaborative exam correction tool leverages a modern tech stack to deliver a robust and efficient user experience:
- Next.js: A powerful React framework for building server-side rendered and statically generated web applications.
- Prisma: An ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) tool for seamless database interactions.
- TypeScript: A statically typed superset of JavaScript that enhances code quality and maintainability.
- Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapid UI development.
- Pusher/soketi: A service for real-time communication, ensuring that updates are instantly reflected across the application.
