Product development · Higher education, examination assessment · India
15 million answerbooks digitised, with 100% recorded uptime since launch.
A long established examination services provider asked us to take university exam evaluation off paper. We engineered with them from 2014 to 2024, and the Digital Assessment System served four universities with 100% recorded uptime.
At a glance
- Engagement
- 2014 to 2024
- Served
- 4 universities, 1,000+ assessors at once
- Avesta team
- Hardware, platform and DevOps engineers
- Scope
- Custom hardware, cloud platform, 24/7 DevOps
What changed
What changed
Before
Results waited on trucks and hand tabulation.
Now
A marked answerbook reaches the university as data, with nobody re keying it.
- Answerbooks processed
- 15M+
- Recorded uptime since 2020
- 100%
- Custom scanners deployed
- 3,000+
- Answerbooks a month at peak
- 1M+
The ask
University evaluation ran on paper. Millions of physical answerbooks had to be moved, stored and tabulated by hand, which held up results and cost money at every step.
Two things blocked digitising it. No scanner on the market took an A3 answerbook without cutting the spine, and every university marks to its own rules.
What we built
The scanner nobody sold
So we built one. We designed, prototyped and manufactured an A3 scanner that digitises an answerbook without cutting it, which keeps the original intact. More than 3,000 of them were deployed on premise at client sites, feeding scans into the cloud platform.
Hardware we had to make ourselves
No scanner on the market took an A3 answerbook whole. We designed, prototyped and manufactured one that scans without cutting the spine. Over 3,000 were deployed on premise at client sites.
A platform built to take peak load
More than 10 microservices run on AWS ECS, with Lambda handling background work. S3 holds the images, RDS for PostgreSQL holds the structured data, and SQS moves messages between services.
The method
How the workflow runs
01
Operators scan answerbooks on our own hardware, on premise at the university.
02
A quality control module lets checkers pass or fail each scan.
03
Passed scans upload to secure S3 buckets.
04
Authorised assessors log in and mark the digital answerbooks on demand.
05
The system collates the marks and exports results to the university.
What it changed
How it grew
One university at launch in 2020, a second in 2021. By 2022 the platform carried more than 1,000 assessors at once through peak examination periods. Two more universities came in 2023, and throughput reached a million answerbooks a month. 2024 passed 15 million answerbooks in total.
- System uptime
- 100% recorded since July 2020
- Answerbooks processed
- 15,000,000+
- Data under management
- 70+ TB
- Peak throughput
- 1,000,000+ a month
- Assessors at once
- 1,000+
- Universities served
- 4
- Scanning centres
- 300+
- Custom scanners deployed
- 3,000+
- Microservices
- 10+
Who it served
The end customers the platform served
State examination boards
- Assam Board
- Bihar Board
- GSEB, Gujarat
Recruiting boards and universities
- KPSC, a state recruiting board
- ICAI, qualification exams
- RGUHS and MUHS, medical universities
Built to last
Why it keeps working
Recorded uptime has been 100% since July 2020.
- 01
Watched
Prometheus, Grafana and CloudWatch watch the system.
- 02
Shipped without downtime
GitLab CI/CD ships zero downtime releases, and the Electron marking app updates over the air.
Beyond this client
The job transfers
The same problem turns up well beyond this one client. These are the teams it fits.
Anyone assessing at scale
- Examination boards
- Professional qualification bodies
- Universities and recruiting boards
Anyone whose process starts on paper
- Insurance claims
- Government records
- Any workflow where the original must survive
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