Online Placement Test

This is a project of European School of English Malta (ESE) using SoapGateQ! for Domino and its Flex/Flash components.

The Challenge
In high season ESE welcomes a very significant number of new students every Monday morning. Students are to take a placement test for the booked English course on their first school day and a short personal interview, which both lead to the allocation of the appropriate course level.  The paper based test takes place in a large test room (hall). This process takes usually the first half morning and reduces the student’s lesson time. That is despite the Monday morning rush created by this procedure.

The Solution
An online placement test that students can take from home long before their arrival allowing the academics department an early planning of room and teacher requirements.  Whilst ESE uses Lotus Domino as its main platform for its operational applications and data, its official website (from which students could launch the test) is based on ISS .net. Flex/Flash in combination with SoapGateQ and its Flex components allowed ESE to implement a small RIA that could easily be integrated into the official website. Test questions and the results are stored in a Domino database and can now easily be pushed into the classroom allocation software. The system was introduced in summer 2010 and has since reduced the number of students needing to take the test at school by about 70%.

The Project
The project was started in the last quarter 2009 with a changing team of ICT students from the Netherlands who join the ESE IT team on a regular basis as part of a 12 weeks work placement (internship). The ICT students joining ESE are usually in their 3 or 4 year of studying and have usually only pretty basic knowledge about development. The skills for object oriented programming is - as expected - generally not much developed. The ICT students involved had not only to learn and understand the concept of object oriented development, but also the tools they had to use for this project in this 12 weeks period of project participation:

  • Domino Designer (Lotus Script)
  • Flex/Flash Builder (Action Script, MXML)
  • SoapGateQ! and its Flex/Flash components

 

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As a little side note I would like to mention 2 students who did particular well - Sietse Radix and Arjen Wolfard -, who where involved in the final stages of this project and completed another one soon to be discussed here too. Both students where invited to join the Qkom development team (our corporate partner in Germany) in a continuation of their second project.

 

 


The Placement Test Demo
The provided demo is to 100% identical with the ESE Online Placement Test. There is only one difference in the way it is launched. The reason being is that the "real" test is integrated into ESE's Guided eLearning System and therefore authentication takes place before the test is launched. 

For the purpose of the demo we created 5 test students with the names student1, student2, etc. with their respective booking reference B000001, B000002, ... (used as password). This is exactly how ESE students are required to authenticate. Their credentials are the surname and the booking reference.

Like in the real test, once you "Start" the test, the student record is updated with a flag marking the student as "Test Done" and as a result prohibits the student from running the test again. The flag is set whether the student completes/submits the test or not. If the student could not submit the test for a technical reason he or she must contact ESE for a manual reset or simply does the test on arrival (the latter procedure of course is still in place). We have implemented an agent in the demo student database to erase this flag every 15 minutes. 

The questions are a subset of 5 questions taken from the real test of 60 questions. The tests times out after 5 minutes after which the given answers are submitted to the server in the placement test result database. No indication is given regarding the result of the test.