Blockchain-Enabled Academic Assessment for Secure, Scalable, and Tokenized Evaluation on Ethereum and Polygon

Abstract

Blockchain technology has gained prominence in academia as a promising solution to strengthen security, transparency, and interoperability in academic assessment systems. The current research presents the design and implementation of a decentralized Ethereum based examination framework using Ethereum smart contracts, role-based access control (RBAC), and ERC20-based fungible tokenization for academic credits. In contrast to prior works which focus primarily on conceptual frameworks, the proposed system is deployed and evaluated on the Ethereum and Polygon (Layer2) test networks. Further, the architecture integrates off-chain storage via IPFS to minimize gas consumption, while role-specific smart contracts ensure data privacy and regulatory compliance. To enhance trust and confidentiality, zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are incorporated for privacy-preserving answer verification, and decentralized identity (DID) standards are applied for student authentication. Experimental results demonstrate that Layer-2 deployment reduces transaction costs by up to 65% compared with Ethereum mainnet, and the system achieves stable throughput of 42 transactions per second (TPS) under simulated student workloads. Security validation using Slither and MythX confirms resistance to re-entrancy, double-spending, and unauthorized access attacks. The proposed framework establishes a quantifiable, fraud-resistant, and efficient academic assessment model, paving the way for scalable blockchain adoption in higher education.