Alexandria

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Assessment management platform used across the CNEC group.

Overview

Alexandria is a CNEC-developed platform designed to streamline the process of creating, managing, and applying academic assessments.
It provides teachers with a flexible environment to build tests by selecting existing questions or by creating new ones, offering both autonomy and standardization across the educational network.

Technology Stack

• Java EE (Servlets, Filters, JSP, Tag Files)
• Tomcat 9
• MySQL for data persistence
• HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript on the frontend
• Bootstrap for responsive UI

Test Creation

Teachers can easily assemble tests using two main approaches:

• Question Bank Selection: Choose from a large collection of pre-registered questions, categorized by subject, grade level, and difficulty.
• Custom Question Creation: Write and save their own questions, enriching the shared repository and supporting collaborative content development.

This system ensures a balance between consistency and creative freedom, empowering educators while maintaining academic coherence throughout the CNEC network.

Network-Wide Assessments

Beyond individual school usage, Alexandria also supports institution-wide tests that are applied simultaneously across all schools in the CNEC group.
These standardized assessments are crucial for monitoring learning outcomes and ensuring educational quality across different regions.

Advanced Grading with IRT

In recent updates, some assessments now utilize Item Response Theory (IRT) for grading.
This statistical model provides a more accurate measurement of student performance by considering question difficulty and discrimination levels, offering deeper insights into learning progress and assessment reliability.

The screenshot below shows a chart of an IRT scale with the item characteristic curves.

Summary

Alexandria stands as a key component of CNEC’s digital education ecosystem.
By combining intelligent question management, large-scale test administration, and advanced grading methodologies, it supports both teachers and academic coordinators in delivering fair, data-driven evaluations across the entire institution.

My Role

I also worked as a full-stack developer and architect on this project. I was responsible for designing how tests and questions would be stored in the database, as well as how questions should be structured and extended to support different types — all while being treated by the app as a single “question” entity (such as multiple-choice, open-ended, and poll questions).

I also defined the logic for randomizing both the questions and their options, using a consistent random seed for each test attempt.

At one point, I created an API capable of importing up to 25,000 questions from another service. More recently, I developed a new version of this API to integrate with a third-party company, allowing them to read test results and edit certain aspects of the questions, such as their categories.