Treffer: An Auto Grading Online Submission System: Case of Packet Tracer.

Noting the nature of and the changing state of the knowledge economy, the King IV report on corporate governance has advocated the need for an information and technology concept, rather than just information technology. This emphasises the key importance of information that must be stored, processed, and transmitted across a network. However, it has been acknowledged that there is an increasing gap in and a global shortage of ICT networks skills. It then translates that skilful knowledge workers that must design and administer such an ICT network must be adequately trained. The Cisco Academy provides an environment and a platform for such cognitive and psychomotor training. It has come to the fore in a 2014 survey of Cisco's academy instructors that there is a pervasive challenge with cheating on questions and this is also fast encroaching to skills assessments carried out in the Packet Tracer network simulator (which is essentially a virtual learning environment). The question that then arose is that "can technology be deployed to determine authenticity of student assessments and/or can authenticity of assessments submitted online be assured?" To address this, we have developed an online submission system built with JAVA and PHP, which assures the authenticity of 'test of skills' assessments that can be submitted online. The uniqueness of our system (that derives from scoping literature survey and experimentation development), is seen in matching the identity of students submitting their completed assessment online to the inbuilt (embedded) users' profile of the Cisco Packet Tracer file. Robust functional testing has affirmed that the changing of file name by a student does not allow a student to evade the system (in that students cannot successfully receives marks from another student's work). Not only are submissions made, the system also automatically grades the submitted Packet Tracer based assessments and presents students with their marks and other pertinent information. The feedback is a great feature that could be explored further in assessment analytics and open education resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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