Products & Services

System of remote education "META-EXAM" is a unique software product designed for organizing a worldwide examination network not limited to a single university or organization.

The system covers the needs of all the participants of the examination process – business organisers, exam providers, system administrators, distributors, exam centres, exam planners, candidates, exam results checking service, billing service, back office, certificate issuing management centre.

The product’s main features are:

• unification and simplification of ordering and passing electronic exams;
• simplification of interaction between the system’s participants (exam bodies, exam centers, candidates);
• guaranteed reliability of the system participants’ interaction ensured through the use of EJB technology and authorization and segregation mechanisms;
• one of the most important features unique to this product is the mechanism of the candidate’s identification and the candidate’s behavior control during the examination. This feature is not available in any other competing product.

The system can work over LAN, Intranet and Internet providing a very high level of:

• Scalability

  Software solution of system of remote education "META-EXAM" can support the worldwide network of Exam Centres with a single control Centre, as well as small local examination network using the same architecture. System of remote education "META-EXAM" can provide and process various kinds of exams in various application areas at the same time supporting the multi-institution business model. The system uses the data distribution mechanisms, such as segregation, which allow different organizations to work in the same system of remote education "META-EXAM" without having impact or even knowing of each other using the same system instance.

• Performance

  The system can easily process different types of exams, like ones that are presented through a web browser, or standalone, or using its own presentation software, with minimal complexity of integrating each type. The system can support any type of exam if we have its standard or interfaces to interact with the third-party examination utility. This provides great flexibility and ability to complete any examination task using a single system, with centralized data storage on the server that makes any exam-related data available when needed. The system can process hundreds of users working simultaneously. In case of considerable increase of the number of users, the only thing that needs to be done is expanding the servers’ capacity. The system can process up to hundreds of thousands of exams a year.

• Reliability

  System of remote education "META-EXAM" provides potentially unlimited reliability determined only by hardware configuration. With the use of modern database with data replication to another database instance, two or more servers for database and two or more for the Application Server tasks, the system has a very high (nearly unbreakable) degree of reliability. It can provide high level of reliability acceptable for most tasks in cheaper configurations as well. Even in the minimal configuration, the system will provide great reliability that is determined by the employed technologies like EJB.

• Security

  The system uses different security mechanisms, such as user authentication and flexible user authorization for performing each task. Strong data restrictions will not allow the user access the data he is not supposed to access. Even when performing a permitted task, such mechanisms as segregation will not let an Exam Centre Administrator see the data of another Exam Centre. The system functionality is role based. Each role has corresponding separate standalone client software supporting all the functionality available to this role. For each kind of user, there is software realizing all functionality for the corresponding users. Traffic encryption by means of SSL can be used as well.

The web part of the software enables every candidate (or his visitor) to view his profile, table of exam results, video clips recorded during his examination and other information.

If a need arises, the payment subsystem covering all financial operations the customer wishes to control can be added to the product.

OS the system can be used with

• For the server group computers: Windows 2000 Server or higher or any UNIX OS (System V Release 4.x) where the selected application server (e.g. JBoss) and HTTP server can function
• For the client: any OS from the following line:

  	- Windows 2000 Professional
  	- Windows XP

As application server and database server, JBoss and MS SQL server are used by default. But the system can run on every application or database server. The transformation required for the system to run on a new server will be insignificant.

The product has not been put to industrial use yet but we are planning several pilot projects in the nearest future.

None of the existing competing products in the worldwide examination networks field (e.g. Brainbench) have a mechanism of the candidate’s identification and honesty validation, and many of them do not support the organization of all the business processes.