DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTER BASED ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

Abstract

As online and blended learning has become common place educational strategy in higher education, educators need to reconceptualise fundamental issues of teaching, learning and assessment in non traditional spaces. These issues include concepts such as validity and reliability of assessment in online environments in relation to serving the intended purposes. It is therefore imperative to develop a reliable means of assessing students using internet based technologies. This research provides the design of a computer based assessment system where tests in multiple choice formats will be taken online and graded immediately. The system has an adaptive feature based on Item Response Theory (IRT) which helps in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of student’s knowledge in different domains. This is an important requirement while evaluating students because it provides a way to judge students understanding of a particular subject. The system ensures examinee’s are supplied questions that are challenging enough but not too difficult, which would lead to frustration and confusion. A case study of Benue State University, Makurdi was carried out. The system was able to estimate the abilities of 65% of the students after they attempted just six questions, reducing the length and time of the test by more than 50%. The web system is implemented using PHP Scripting Language and MySQL as the back-end engine, its background testing server is the Apache integrated in EasyPHP. The research concludes that the developed system has the capabilities of estimating student ability level and minimizing the number of questions in a test, which reduces testing time while maintaining the same level of reliability. Shorter testing time reduces fatigue, a factor that can significantly affect an examinee’s test result