Medic Quiz

Digitization and automatic evaluation of tests for future medics (2020)

Another "side hustle" task for a client. This one I got from an acquaintance of a guy I met at a beach volleyball tournament. She was working with students preparing for admission exams at medical faculty. The assignment was to digitize tests from biology and chemistry, so they could be taken and evaluated online with a time limit.

At first, I received the materials in the form of scanned papers in PDF. I tried to apply OCR on them, and although I was quite impressed with the results, it was impossible to detect the structure of a question (with a number, the question itself, and multiple answers, each denoted by a letter). So I asked for some other source and fortunately, she was able to provide me with tests in DOCX format and answer sheets in XLSX. Much better.

I quickly researched the ways to parse a Word document and finally settled on converting it with Mammoth library to HTML and then simply parse it as a webpage with JSoup. The process was quite tedious, as there were irregularities in the tests requiring manual correction and some answers were in a form of an embedded image (which Mammoth can' convert), so it took some time. On the other hand, parsing the answer sheets was straightforward with the help of the Apache POI library.

When I was done (having converted both the questions and answers to structured YAML files), all that was left was to put it online. I chose Spring Boot framework and Thymeleaf template engine (for UI I opted for Semantic UI components). I also added basic authentication, allowed the administrator to preview all tests and implemented a system for generating a one-time link with access token for a specific test to be given to students. I deployed the whole thing with Heroku and handed it to the client, who was satisfied with the results.

Lessons learned: How to digitize documents and parse them into meaningful structures.