Upper Secondary School Finals - A Perfect Use Case For Blockchain

In this video, an IT support guy sets up the computers to be ready for the test takers (in Finnish).

It is the time of year when Finnish upper secondary school seniors take the Matriculation Exam, which is made up of individual tests in each subject. The number of subjects varies between the mandatory four up to a dozen or so depending on the students and what their schedules allow. From this spring on all of the tests will be digital. There are hundreds of schools involved and the total number of students taking the exam is about 30,000. The exams have been organized by the University of Helsinki since 1919. Their purpose for the students is to gain qualification to study at a university.

As you might imagine, there have been problems. I read in a newspaper that due to servers crashing, several schools have experienced delays lasting several hours. The old system was even worse. The test answers were written on paper and the papers were taken home by the teachers who scored the tests and took them back to the school. After that, they were sent to a national board, the members of which are experts in each field to be given final scores. The scoring system has not changed. In each school, the students' own teachers score the tests after which the national board checks them and changes the scores if necessary. One of the problems with both the old and the new system is chain of custody. The old system was based entirely on trusting that no teacher would meddle with the test papers for any reason including bribery or favoritism - or simply lose any test paper by accident. The new system is based on centralized servers which has caused problems as servers crashing in individual schools have caused considerable delay. On has to wonder what happens if any such server would experience a hard drive crash, which could result in the total loss of answers for hundreds of students. Also, a centralized system is much vulnerable to hacking than a decentralized one. The new system was implemented by Reaktor and cost 3-5 million euros to implement according to Wikipedia.

In my opinion, the exam should've been implemented on a Steem clone modified to allow for the storing of binary files (images are produced as answers to questions) or maybe even Steem itself with IPFS or something similar used to store the binary files. Steem and IPFS are existing software and battle tested to be perfectly capable to serve as a decentralized, fault tolerant back end where a perfect unalterable record of modifications to data is stored. Data on Steem is tamper proof and the system as a whole is robust. It's been up and running for almost three years except for planned interruptions at times of hard forks.

Having the Matriculation Exam using Steem as its back end would've only required new front ends to be developed. Despite all data being completely public, the data could've been encrypted by the purpose built fronts end if necessary. (I don't actually know if the answers are public documents or not.). The teachers, the national board would've had keys enabling them to read the students' encrypted answers. The students could've retained the encryption keys to make it possible for them to follow the grading of their own answers in real time. At the time a student finished a test, the master key and the posting keys of their account would've been changed to prevent them from changing their answers. Or they would've been required to sign a transaction that verifies them having finished taking the test after which all edits would've been considered null and void for the purposes of scoring.

I believe it would've been much cheaper to develop 2-3 slightly different versions of a Steem user interface than to build an entirely new system from scratch including a back end and several front ends. Using Steem or any blockchain as the back end would've made the system much more fault tolerant, robust and ensured its incorruptibility. To further the latter goal, the whole scheme to encrypt all answers and scores could've been left unimplemented.

Finland already has a new centralized system for digital final national tests, but I think other countries with plans to go digital could be approached to suggest using Steem or a Steem clone as the back end for their system.