YAPS -- Your Open Examination System for Activating and emPowering Students

TL;DR

YAPS is an open, flexible e-assessment system designed to enhance student engagement, provide rapid feedback, and support competence-oriented testing across diverse educational domains.

Contribution

The paper introduces YAPS, a novel open assessment platform that emphasizes ease of use, extensibility, and competence-based evaluation, with practical applications in various courses.

Findings

Effective in diverse lecture settings

Provides fast, transparent feedback to students

Supports competence-oriented assessments

Abstract

There are numerous e-assessment systems devoted to specific domains under diverse license models. Cost, extensibility, and maintainability are relevant issues for an institution. Ease of use and inclusion into courses are educator's main concerns. For students the user experience and fast transparent feedback plus "better" tests are most important. Many exams still focus on testing memorized knowledge, instead of improving and testing skills with competence-oriented learning support and examinations, respectively. We discuss design decisions and present the resulting architecture of YAPS - Your open Assessment system for emPowering Students. YAPS has been used for very diverse lectures in logistics, computer engineering, and algorithms for exams, but also for empowering students by fast feedback during the learning period. We report on results in a basic lecture on Computer Science for Mechanical Engineers.