REal Time Intranet Based Entrance ExamiNAtion System (RETINAS) रेटिनाज
RETINAS is a research and development project initiated by Prof. Dr. Bharat Raj Pahari, Dean of Institute of Engineering (IOE), Tribhuvan University (TU) on 2012 with the objective to select highly qualified candidates by having sohpisticated computer based entrance examination system for bachelor/master level study at the institute. IOE is the government owned oldest institution in Nepal providing quality education in the engineering domain since 1972. However in the recent decade, other several universities are established in the country, IOE hasn't lost its popularity with its major features to have dedication on quality education to fulfill the world class education. As a public institution, it provides equal opportunities for all qualified citizens to enter into the university education. IOE has been conducting its entrance examination every year since 1972. There were more than 10,000 competitive applicants in the entrance exam of bachelors program. Hence less than 35% students were selected for the admission. The Entrance Examination Board of IOE massively conducts yearly entrance exam by planning four slots in a day and one slot consists of 240 examinees. Hence, it takes almost 10 to 12 days to conduct exam for about 10,000 applicants.
As being the technical institute, historically IOE is always ahead in the use of technology. The increasing burden in the manual processing of the entrance exam enforces IOE to step into the automatic exam oepration and result processing system. Since 2004, IOE developed automatic answer sheet scanning and processing system and started online based application since 2009. From the year 2014, IOE has started fully computer based entrance examination at its resourceful centers at Pulchowk. The fully managed and hassle free application system of IOE entrance examination ( http://entrance.ioe.edu.np) allows applicants to simply apply and receive admit card with specified time slot from online registration system.
Project RETINAS had been executed since 2012 and is currently led by dean of Institute of Engineering Prof. Dr. Triratna Bajracharya including highly qualified research oriented faculties of IOE. RETIENAS has the following features:
It is an automated system for Application Registration, Processing, Verification and Admit Card Generation for BE/BArch as well as M.Sc. Entrance Examination. The system also reserved the exam date and time slot for every applicants. Highly secured intrancet system is available at Information and Communication Technology Center at IOE Pulchowk. Students appear in the center and give exam from specified LAB and the computer.
The redundant entrance examination servers (WEB,DB) are maintained and more than 240 client computers are dedicately placed at ICTC. Hence 240 examinees can appear at a time for the examination
The deveoped packages to conduct entrance examination is fully interactive client server based system in which the time between server and client is well synchronized. We implemented lamports timestamp with the cristian's clock synchronization algorithm to distribute updated timestamp from server. Since the system is on the single LAN (Intranet), hence the propagation delay between client and server for timestamp distribution is very little (in micro-second) that does not considerably affect examinees during examination.
LICT team is continuing the research and development of the system to make it fully distributed and run on multiple LAN with the introdcution of CACHE servers to balance the load and incraese the concurrent access during examination so that we can increase the number of examinees in one slot.
