DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A ROLE-BASED WEB ASSESSMENT PLATFORM FOR NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES USING THE LARAVEL MVC FRAMEWORK

In many Nigerian universities, assessment still means printed scripts, long marking weekends and results that reach students weeks after the examination. This paper describes the design and implementation of a web-based student assessment system built to take that burden off lecturers while keeping the process fair and traceable. The system uses Laravel 10, MySQL 8.0 and Bootstrap 5 in a three-tier Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, and was developed iteratively following an Agile process. Five modules were implemented: authentication and role management, course and assessment management, a reusable question bank, timed online test delivery with automated grading, and result generation with performance reporting. Administrators, instructors and students each see only what their role permits. The system was verified with 30 structured black-box test cases covering all modules, and every case passed. A pilot with 30 users (5 administrators, 10 instructors, 15 students) returned an overall mean acceptance rating of 4.69 out of 5. The platform runs entirely on open-source components and ordinary hardware, which makes it realistic for institutions with limited budgets. We describe the design decisions, report what worked, and discuss the limits of the current version, including the absence of automated grading for open-ended answers and of proctoring features.