Online examination platform

Lecturers build question banks and schedule timed exams. Students sit them in a browser with a countdown. Multiple choice marks itself; essays go to a human.

New here: questions that are reused across exams, and a single Answer table that has to hold two completely different shapes of answer.

Resource	What it holds
Course	What the exam is for
Bank	A pool of questions
Question	MCQ, true/false or essay, with marks and difficulty
Option	A choice, and whether it is correct
Exam	Scheduled, timed, worth so many marks
ExamQuestion	Which questions are on it, in what order
Attempt	One student sitting one exam
Answer	What they put
ProctorEvent	Tab switches and the like

1. The app

Next.js

pnpm create flare-framework exams
cd exams
docker compose up -d

Cloudflare

pnpm create flare-framework exams --stack cloudflare
cd exams

2. The question bank

npx flare gen resource Course --icon book-open --group Setup \
  --fields 'code:string!, title:string'

npx flare gen resource Bank --icon layers --group Questions \
  --fields 'name:string!, createdById:string, course:belongsTo(Course)'

npx flare gen resource Question --icon help-circle --group Questions \
  --fields 'kind:enum(mcq,trueFalse,essay), text:markdown, marks:int, difficulty:enum(easy,medium,hard), bank:belongsTo(Bank)'

npx flare gen resource Option --icon list-checks --group Questions \
  --fields 'text:string, correct:boolean, question:belongsTo(Question)'

text:markdown on a question, because exam questions have code blocks, lists and the occasional formula, and a plain textarea makes a mess of all three.

An essay question simply has no Option rows. That is cleaner than a nullable column or a second table, and it means the marking code asks “are there options?” rather than reading a type flag it has to keep in step.

3. Reusing questions

npx flare gen resource Exam --icon file-check --group Exams \
  --fields 'title:string, startsAt:datetime, endsAt:datetime, durationMin:int, totalMarks:int, shuffle:boolean, status:enum(draft,published,closed), course:belongsTo(Course)'

npx flare gen resource ExamQuestion --icon list-ordered --group Exams \
  --fields 'position:int, exam:belongsTo(Exam), question:belongsTo(Question)'

ExamQuestion is a junction, like the library’s BookAuthor — but this one was always going to carry a column. position is the order on the paper, and it is per exam: the same question is third in January and eleventh in the resit. That is exactly why Flare makes you write the junction rather than offering a many-to-many field that cannot hold it.

durationMin and the start/end window are different things. The window is when the exam is available; the duration is how long you get once you start. A student opening it at 10:50 for an 11:00 close gets ten minutes, and your timer has to take the earlier of the two.

4. Attempts and answers

npx flare gen resource Attempt --icon timer --group Exams \
  --fields 'startedAt:datetime, submittedAt:datetime?, score:int?, status:enum(inProgress,submitted,marked,abandoned), studentId:string, exam:belongsTo(Exam)'

npx flare gen resource Answer --icon pencil --group Exams \
  --fields 'answerText:text?, marksAwarded:int?, attempt:belongsTo(Attempt), question:belongsTo(Question), chosenOption:belongsTo(Option)?'

chosenOption:belongsTo(Option)? — optional, and that is the interesting part. One Answer table serves both kinds of question:

• multiple choice fills chosenOption and leaves answerText null
• an essay fills answerText and leaves chosenOption null

Two nullable columns, one of which is always set. You could model it as two tables, and some people do; one table means marking, auto-save and “what did they answer for question 7” are each one query instead of a union.

marksAwarded:int? null means not yet marked, which distinguishes it from a genuine zero. An essay scoring 0 and an essay nobody has read are not the same thing, and a non-nullable column cannot tell you which you have.

score:int? on the attempt is the same idea at the other level.

5. Proctoring

npx flare gen resource ProctorEvent --icon eye --group Exams \
  --fields 'kind:enum(tabSwitch,blur,paste,fullscreenExit), occurredAt:datetime, attempt:belongsTo(Attempt)'

Append-only. The browser reports; the server records; nobody edits. Whether three tab switches is cheating is a human judgement, and the table’s job is to make that judgement possible rather than to make it.

6. Run it

npx flare migrate
npx flare seed:resource Course 8
npx flare seed:resource Bank 12
npx flare seed:resource Question 60
npx flare seed:resource Option 200
npx flare seed:resource Exam 15
npx flare seed:resource Attempt 80
npx flare seed:resource Answer 300
npx flare dev

What you still owe

This project has the largest “yours” section of any on this site, because almost all of its interesting behaviour is timing and trust.

• The timer. Client-side countdown, server-side truth. Never trust a submission’s timestamp from the browser; compare startedAt plus the duration against the server clock, and reject late answers there.
• Auto-submit and auto-save. Saving every answer as it changes is what makes a dropped connection survivable, and it is the feature students notice.
• Shuffling. shuffle:boolean is the flag; deriving a stable per- attempt order from it is the work — stable, so a refresh does not reorder the paper mid-exam.
• Auto-marking. For each answer, is chosenOption.correct true. A dozen lines, and the satisfying part.
• One attempt per student per exam. Not in the schema: add a unique constraint on (examId, studentId) in a hand-written migration. Two browser tabs will otherwise start two attempts.
• Analytics: pass rate, mean score, and which question everybody got wrong — which is the one lecturers actually use.

Make it yours

• Students never read the question bank. npx flare gen policy Question --roles lecturer,admin and npx flare gen policy Option --roles lecturer,admin. The sidebar hides what they may not read, and so does the API. Serving a paper to a student is your own endpoint, which returns questions without correct.
• Students see only their own attempts. npx flare gen policy Attempt --roles '*' --own studentId --own-except lecturer,admin
• Soft delete exams, so a withdrawn paper and its attempts survive an appeal.