EMTIHAN: Design of a novel approach to secure online examination challenge in remote learning

In this paper, a secure exam proctoring assistant ‘EMTIHAN’ (which means exam in Arabic/Persian/Urdu/Turkish languages) is developed to address concerns related to online exams for handwritten topics by allowing students to submit their answers online securely via their mobile devices. This system is designed with an aim to lessen the student’s burden of exam submission by offering portable hardware and easy-to-use cloud infrastructure. The main contribution of this research is to design an innovative system for online examination (in remote or distance learning scenarios), and using mixed methods i.e. both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis to verify its performance. The comparative results regarding submission time and security features have proven the efficacy of EMTIHAN against manual submission with participants across 5 countries using purposive sampling and currently available solutions e.g. Chaoxing MOOC and Google Classroom with 94.5% student satisfaction rate. Furthermore, app scan quality is measured using structural similarity index measure comparing with popular CamScanner app showing better quality despite image compression.