Towards electronic exams in undergraduate engineering

In this work, we describe the first step towards electronic exams at the University of Stuttgart. The motivation, both driven by students and lecturers, is to offer assessments that are closer to real-life programming by allowing interactive programming and debugging not possible with pen and paper exams. This is in so far important as skills in computer algebra systems as for example MATLAB or programming languages like Java are an elementary ingredient of any engineering study nowadays. In this paper, we describe the technological basis tor computer based exams based on a system already successfully deployed for homework assignments, and describe its transition to an electronic assessment system. We discuss not only the technological requirements on software, its architecture and our choices for hardware, but also provide a brief introduction into the organizational and legal challenges that we are going to overcome.