Block-Chain Based Grading Students Assignments

This is quite usual nowadays that some university courses are taught for hundreds of students simultaneously. To accomplish the practical part of such courses, students are requested to implement practical assignments or projects and upload them into the Learning Management System for further evaluation and getting the final grade. Grading such students’ assignment is often carried out by a special team of experts that share, integrate and interpret evaluation data. In order to ensure fairness and equal treatment principles for the whole grading process the team members evaluate different aspects of the student projects independently, and store the results into a special repository where the results are integrated to infer the final grade. Thus, the whole grading process needs to rely on a data repository accessible for all the team members. Fairness of the grading can be defined in this case as an essentially collaborative evaluation of each project. Thus, individual team member cannot affect final evaluation results for a particular project. This situation raises a security and privacy concern on the data repository.
In this paper, we describe an innovative method of grading practical assignments for a big university course based on so-called block-chain data structures.
Thus, the method guarantees the fairness and homogeneity of the grading process, and provides a reasonable level of data security and privacy.
From the student’s perspective, the method provides all the necessary information on the flow of the grading process.