MGU Exam Result Announcement : A nightmare
Even without proper access to resources, a super-nerd like me could attempt to resolve the issue. It's not always the lack of the right technology. It's the lack of a determined mindset to make it work.
According to our current university curriculum, exams are an integral part of every student's academic journey. As universities claim, they are the ultimate test of a student's knowledge and understanding of a subject, and their performance in exams can often make or break their future (which I don't believe at all). It is, therefore, no surprise that students experience a range of emotions, including frustration and tension while waiting for their exam results.
I did my post-graduation at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. I completed my graduation from the same university itself. Over the span of last 5-6 years, nothing changed regarding the way in which the exam results are published.
- From the MGU Facebook page, students get to know the updates regarding the result announcement (which is kinda weird).
- Students in response start surfing the notifications section of the damn old stupid thing that the university calls their official website.
- If you are lucky enough, you might get a link to some page (Sorry to say, I wasn't lucky, not even once). Else, continue for some miracle to happen.
- Oftentimes, I've waited until midnight to get a glimpse of my result.
Why is it the same, even after technology isn't a barrier anymore?
Can't we resolve the issue once and for all?
Is it too much to expect the results to be delivered via email or something?
I totally respect the fact that the process of releasing exam results is not as simple as sending an email to a bunch of students. One prevalent notion against the idea of emailing the results is regarding the confidentiality of student information. But on the contrary, I haven't seen any sensitive personal information on those pages, rather than a bunch of publically available data fields like the PNR Number, Name, Course, and Exam Center.
Let's foresay, there is some sensitive information. Are we technologically that behind, such that we couldn't send a single file securely via mail. Even today, banks and financial institutions, email their users' monthly transaction histories as password-protected files. Can't we adopt the same.
Another major issue is the huge peak in inbound traffic for a short about of time. Usually, when the results got published, thousands of students flood the website for links to access their results. This ends with the server being crushed in seconds (if load balancing & auto-scaling aren't enabled - which I strongly suspect (not sure)). If the results are delivered via email, there is no room for these issues.
MGU Result Scrapper
Here's a small script that I wrote around 10 months back. I've recently used it 2 days back to fetch all our 3rd Semester MCA results. The script just scrapped the results of all 60 students in a matter of just over 60 seconds.
Here I've used Playwright to scrape/automate the website. Playwright is a framework for Web Testing and Automation. It supports headless execution for all browsers. The script basically mimics the manual process of getting the results and takes a screenshot of each result and saves it in a folder. The script also works for UG results. Just comment Line:9 and uncomment Line:10. The Exam ID ( option value ) can be obtained by inspecting the Examination <select> tag on the result portal.
Script Demo & GitHub Repository
decoded-cipherFuture Scope
We could easily send emails to all students using NodeMailer, and that too for free in a matter of seconds. I might update the script soon. So don't forget to drop a star 🌟 on the repo to get notified! The script as of now is not that efficient. The initial idea of the script was to fetch only 2-3 results, and therefore fetch PNR from an Array. If we're using it to fetch results of a continuous range of PNR, we better update the script with a loop.
In conclusion, even without proper access to the results API or DB, a super-nerd like me could attempt to resolve the issue to an extent. Then else could the university do, if they wish/work for it.
