OpenExam is an enterprise grade platform for electronic exams dating back to 2010. The online version (second generation) provides an web based user interface for teacher to compose exams and correct results and for students to conduct exams and retrieve their results. It comes with a complete web service API making it easy to integrate with external systems.
The 2.x (second generation) of this system is built on top of the Phalcon MVC framework that in addition to being fast, also provides some advanced features utilized by this project. No client installation is required system end-users, a decent web browser is enough for both teachers or students (thus its name openexam-online).
Released under GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPL2).
You are free to fork this project and modify at will, but any derived work must retain original license headers in source code and new files added must also be released under GPL2. Any project derived from this code base should chose their own unique project name to avoid confusion.
The system requirements are more or less LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). Most other RDBMS supported by PDO should work direct or after implementing the database adapter interface.
For production its recommended to use some cache method (Redis/APCu) and setting up the system to run behind a load-balancer (IPVS/Keepalive) using fastCGI (PHP-FPM). See INSTALL and docs in the source code for more information.
The current release of openexam-online requires Phalcon MVC 3.x installed under either PHP 5.6 or 7.x.
The system comes with many features that can be turned on/off or customized by editing the configuration files. The best way to explore them is to download the image files from the project page (for running inside a virtual machine).
Users having the teacher role can create exams. For each exams, other roles can be granted to co-workers granting them permission to perform specific tasks (contributors, invigilators or decoders). Each question can have one or more correctors, by default the contributor adding a question become its corrector unless changes by the exam creator.
- Teachers administrates their own exams which yields zero administration for system managers.
- Automatic grant the teacher role (yielding permission to create exams) to authenticated employees based on LDAP-attributes or membership.
- Support for centralized or distributed collaboration on an exam.
- Export to external tools for answer correction/cheat detection or analyze of exam results.
- Exams can be locked to specific locations. Once opened by a student, it can't be accessed from another computer.
People that is setting up this system has some some features to play with to customize the installation to suite their needs. For runtime administration the impersonate feature is useful as it provides a way to see the exact same view as the end-user.
- Support for sharding (spreading a single database table over multiple servers).
- Audit of all changes in the database state (can be customized) with different destination types (i.e. SQL or HTTP).
- Advanced database and directory service cache (cache on read for all data source).
- Classified logging with multiple targets (file, web or syslog).
- Impersonation as one of the system user for administration.
- Designed for web cluster deployment with nearly parallell scaling due to minimized database I/O.
These are a couple of system features that can be useful for integrating OpenExam Online with authentication sources, directory services or external systems. The web services might also be used by end-users for their custom tasks.
- Web services (SOAP, REST and AJAX) making it easy to integrate with external systems or create custom tools and clients.
- Multiple catalog services can be plugged in. Internal catalog service for SAML-authentication.
- Authenticator stack supporting SSO (i.e. SWAMID or CAS) or selecting login service.
- Tasks gives access to system classes for periodical or long time running processes.
- Custom roles for service integration.
The project logotype in all shapes and colors are intellectual properties owned by Anders Lövgren and donated to the OpenExam project (http://openexam.io) that also claims the rights to restrict its usage.
In general the logotype can be freely used without permission, except for your own projects including projects forked from https://github.com/openexam.
Usage as the site logotype is restrained to the official project page or sites managed by the OpenExam project.
For more information visit The OpenExam Project page.