PRESENT- DAY PATENT- A PREVIEW

With the advent of modern technologies and internet discovery, online exams have become much more customary, trading- off the time and cost associated with offline exams. To be specific, the spread of COVID-19 pandemic urged the students, scholars and academicians to stay safe at home, transforming education through e-learning platforms into a rule. Nevertheless, assessing the students’ performance in such e-learning platforms through online exams is highly onerous. The reason is that the genuineness of the students' identity and their answers without dishonest practices is hard to acquire, causing the entire education system to fail in producing good learners, economists, researchers and entrepreneurs.  Hence, to cope with this detrimental situation, only two ways exist. One way is to completely eradicate the online-based exams and the other way is to provide the same with infinite security. The former way is impractical, as the online-based exams are already deep-rooted and the act of effacing them is cumbersome due to high internet usage. So, it is worth enough to improve the security of online exams. Three inventors from India, Kavitha S Patil, Binu Dennis and Rajakumar B. R., have envisaged a complete security system for conducting the online exams. Their invention entitled “SMART PEN-BASED IOT NETWORK TO SECURE ONLINE EXAMINATION” might be believed to change the currently existing online exam scenario because of its thriving attributes. The first and foremost attribute is its provision for genuine user detection using a smart pen. The smart pen is embedded with a camera and microphone to capture the video and the audio signals of the user and his/her adjacent belongings (a person or books), as soon as the user starts to write with it. Any fake user and additional sound or object presence from the recorded signals, respectively, denote the presence of an unauthorized user and malpractices.  Subsequently, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to create a document from the contents of the smart pen. Now comes the second attribute of the invention- “The plagiarism detector”. This detector renders additional security by measuring the similarity between the OCR document and a web database, so as to confirm that the document contents are given by the user and not being copied from any websites. The final attribute of the invention is the hacker detector. By it, the user’s smart pen is checked for any sort of hacking activity and the user itself is checked to confirm the use of no other browsers to copy the contents.  Eventually, all the detected data is passed to a server. The user, when found to violate at any of these three detection stages, will be notified to the exam supervisor as not genuine. This invention can be a great boon for both the educational sector and the Human Resource Management (HRM) sector. Many thanks to the authors for their efforts to abstain the online-based exams from its serious irregularities.

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