Efficient and Secure Record-Keeping: A Review of Smart Contract-Based Student Marks Management Systems in Universities

Abstract

Blockchain stores the transaction sequentially in the form of linked blocks. The decentralized and distributed nature of the blockchain makes data easily accessible to the participants of the blockchain network. There are many applications of blockchain in the IT industry as it is one of the growing technology. Traditional education system suffers from marinating the data centrally. Centralized data are a threat to data loss as well as attack. Using blockchain to store and manage data will help to make the data secure, transparent, and available to the different users of the education system. In this study, we have proposed the blockchain based marks management system for the universities. The proposed model implements the smart contract to track the student's academic progress. Different authorized and authenticated users can join the private blockchain network. Nodes in the network have different privileges, which are implemented in the smart contract. Faculty and students are the two main nodes of the network. Faculty can add the students' marks, and students can view and track the progress of the respective subjects. The model also compared the error frequencies between a manual system and a blockchain-based system across five error types: Transposition error, transcription error, calculation error, omission error, and formatting error. The blockchain-based system was particularly effective in reducing omission errors, with an 86.67% reduction compared to the manual System. The blockchain-based system also achieved a 100% reduction in Formatting Errors, showcasing its ability to maintain data integrity and consistency. The immutability feature of blockchain will provide the data integrity of the marks of the student. Overall, the blockchain-based system outperformed the manual System across all error types, demonstrating significant improvements in data accuracy and reliability.