Paper Architecture and an Exam Scoring Application

This paper presents paper architecture and an exam scoring application which runs on the architecture. The paper architecture is unified software architecture that allows the use of several types of electronic pen and paper devices without having to modify the main application. Electronic ink written by students in exams is captured, transformed into a standard format and then sent to the paper architecture server. There the ink is segmented and processed. We have taken a hybrid approach for the scoring application. Selection type questions are automatically recognized and scored. For free text questions we have developed an interface that allows teachers to mark them interactively. It provides question reorganization, empty questions marking, and other techniques to reduce the scoring time. A preliminary evaluation comparing the exams scoring by using the application and by hand showed considerable reduction of the scoring time.