anujmenta / papercop

The Question Paper portal of IIT Kharagpur

Papercop

The Question Paper portal of IIT Kharagpur

Visit : www.papercop.in

#How it all happened?

Step 1 :

• Dump all the papers from the library site. ( Simply mirror the site)
• Rename all the papers with the subject numbers for uniformity and search purposes. ( Using the script "threemasters.py" )
• Manually rename some papers which are left out because of exceptions

Step 2:

• Make encoded data to be used to determine the subjects in a particular semester of particular department.
• We used pickle files to store data.
• Each pickle files contains a list of lists corresponding to every department. (Code not available)

#How it works?

• It processes the input ( Roll number) for all the requred fields i.e Department and Semester number.
• Uses this information to load the corresponding pickle file.
• Use the semester number to obtain the list of subjects in that semester.
• Call "papercop.py" to do the rest.
• Rest: copy requred files into temporary directory, zip it and output it to the user as an attachment.

#Example:

• Input: "12MA20007"
• Pickle file required : "MA2.pickle"
• Semester number = (14-(12))*2 + 2(Spring Semster)
• Obtains list = ['Subject 1.pdf', 'Subject 2.pdf'] Do the rest.

papercop's Issues

Zip file does not open on Ubuntu without Breadth and Additional subjects added.

I tried downloading without giving any option for Breadth and Additional, and again with only Breadth. Zip file failed to open both the times. Worked when Additional was added.

Error:

Archive: xxxxx.zip
End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not
a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the
latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
the last disk(s) of this archive.
unzip: cannot find zipfile directory in one of xxxxx.zip or
xxxxx.zip.zip, and cannot find xxxxx.zip.ZIP, period.

Choice of number of years

By default, users get question papers of three years. We can also ask them to input how much they need (e.g. 2 yrs, 5 yrs) and then return fetching from whatever we have in our database. If they don't give any input, it'll be same as the default.
How good is it?