Adira Exams

What it is

Two exam products at Adira Academy sharing one codebase, built at Impact Solutions Lab.

The first is the annual entrance exam: candidates sit a timed, multi-subject paper in the browser under camera proctoring and get a graded result. I built it during my internship. The second grew out of it after I went full time and is the larger system now: the internal platform the school runs its own term exams on, finals included. Teachers are authoring and marking on it and students are sitting papers on it today.

I am the developer on the application, both the React client and the FastAPI backend. Deployment and infrastructure are someone else's.

Because students are sitting real exams on this right now, this page stays at the level of design principles and skips every mechanism.

System design

• Two products, one codebase. The entrance exam runs once a year and is frozen, so the internal platform had to be built on top of it without disturbing it. Every change on the shared path is additive, and the entrance flow behaves exactly as it did the year before.
• Authoring without a form builder. Teachers write a whole paper in a Google Doc from a plain template. The backend parses it into typed questions, validates it, and turns it into a publishable paper. Anything the parser is unsure of is flagged for the author instead of dropped, because silently losing a question is worse than admitting the parser could not read it.
• The question types a paper needs. Multiple choice, typed answers, spoken answers, handwritten work the student photographs, and coding questions, with images, shared passages, and a calculator where a subject calls for one.
• Grading with the teacher in charge. Multiple choice marks against the key. For open answers an LLM reads the response against that question's rubric and suggests a mark, labelled as a suggestion everywhere it appears. The teacher's mark is a separate record and it is the grade. When no suggestion can be produced, the answer waits for a human rather than becoming a zero.
• Nothing lost mid-exam. Answers are saved as they are given rather than held until submit, so a closed tab or a dropped connection costs one answer at worst and never the paper.
• One loop for the teacher. Write, publish, assign to classes, watch progress, mark what is left, release results. Everything else in the system exists to keep those six steps boring.

The rest is on request

The architecture, the proctoring and grading design, and the tradeoffs stay private because students are sitting finals on this system now. If you'd like to walk through it, reach out and I'm happy to share selectively.