SmartExam

Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic has expedited the digitalization of education in the form of remote learning and e-exams. Full-time learning and assessments have resulted in disrupted daily living schedules and unbalanced workload, thus exacerbating time management and health vulnerabilities. For example, Elsalem et al. (2020) found that remote e-exams have negative influences on students’ diet, sleep, and exercising habits, as well as increasing smoking consumption.These problems are especially complicated for students who have financial insecurities and excessive stress from coursework and multiple employment positions. To prevent all these issues, time management has become extremely pivotal.

Therefore, we have initiated an immediate solution: creating an application that helps students track their exams and manage study plans respectively, aiming at the highest scores and most effective exam-taking strategies with least stress and anxiety as possible.

What it does

SmartExam is an application that helps users better their exam preparation with two main has two key features:

Exam Tracker - simulates a to-do application that allows users to:

organize and prioritize exams per term by adding/removing exam information
customize exam information by setting name, score aim, exam difficulty level, date & time for each exam
set time preference by turning reminder on/off with a simple double-click

Study Plan Generator - suggests a proficient study plan with an algorithm built from:

how many days left until the exam week
score aims and difficulty levels of each exam

How we built it

Our goal is to design and develop a full-stack application with a simple and intuitive user interface (UI) for minimum time spent and maximum effectiveness. Therefore, we built a single-page application (SPA) and styled our website using an open-source front-end JavaScript library (React) alongside HTML and CSS. To host the local web service, we used a mock REST API called JSON server.

We developed an algorithm to generate a proficient study plan based on the exam schedule, goal, and learning ability of each user. From the Exam Tracker feature, we took in two input values for each exam, which were the score aim (ranging from A to F) and the level of difficulty (ranging from “super easy” to “super hard”). In addition, users were required to put in how many days left until their exam week. For each exam, an evaluation value was computed by taking the sum of its difficulty level and the aiming score of a test-taker. Then, our Study Plan Generator would suggest how many days out of the remaining days that a user needed to study for each exam in proportion to their evaluation value.

Challenges we ran into

One of our main challenges was algorithm design. We were attempting to build a study plan generator based on the spaced repetition learning technique. However, because of the short time span of this project, we could not move on with this idea. Instead, we successfully developed a simple algorithm that could suggest precise and reasonable study plans corresponding to each user’s schedule, ability, and demand. We generalized (1) the grading scale as categorical values from A to F (corresponding with their baseline ratio scales from 90% to 50%) and (2) the difficulty level as a 5-scale rating, ranging from “super easy” to “super hard”, so that our application would be suitable for users from multiple education systems.

Another obstacle that our team faced was beta testing. We were hoping to test the efficiency of our showcase, demo SmartExam to students from each of our team members’ schools, and get their feedback on how their exam performance had improved since they used our product. We were also hoping to receive advice on how to improve the UI. However, due to the time limitation, we were unable to have users test our application and provide feedback.

Our team also faced coding issues since we are all new to React. We spent a large amount of time initially understanding its concepts and usages, and then dealing with the bugs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of/Lessons that we learned

Our primary accomplishments include developing a fully functional web application to complement our idea using React although none of our team members had much hands-on experience with React before TecHacks 2021. We have learned to utilize React components to optimize the reusability and independence of our codes, and we’re proud of our final product. We’re looking very much forward to working on further React projects in the future.

Another accomplishment is the study plan generating algorithm we made in a short period of time. Our team is a combination of members with diverse backgrounds, including education, philosophy, psychology and computer science, and we have utilized our expertise to build the algorithm from scratch. If the time allowed, we would definitely expand our algorithm in the direction of the spaced repetition technique that we originally referred to.

Finally, through the literature review on pressing social issues in the theme of education, our team learned about education equity, initiatives for social change, and sympathy towards underprivileged students. We designed our product with a view to assisting the low-income, non-tech-savvy students, in order to help them stay on top of their exams and complete their education with ease to prepare for future academic and career goals.

What's next for SmartExam

First, we hope to build an integrated calendar into our application, which can showcase the details of each day and become even more user-friendly with no typing.

Next, we will look into more established formulas in educational assessment and the concept of spaced repetition to develop a more accurate and efficient algorithm to generate study plans with the integrated calendar. That way, the recommended plans will be more specific: if users click on each date in the calendar, it will display specifically what subject to study on that day.

Finally, after the product engineering phase, we will conduct prototype testing on a large number of college students from different institutions to get constructive feedback and advice on UI/UX and exam performance efficiency.