A FILKOM UB community service team spent months reconfiguring a Moodle based testing platform directly inside Malang Regency's own exam laboratory.
Malang Regency's civil service agency runs its promotion and recruitment exams on its own computers, and by 2024 the system behind those exams badly needed an overhaul.
The Badan Kepegawaian dan Pengembangan Sumber Daya Manusia Pemerintah Kabupaten Malang, known as BKPSDM Pemkab Malang, administers Computer Assisted Test, or CAT, exams from its own dedicated CAT laboratory. A community service team from Fakultas Ilmu Komputer, Universitas Brawijaya, made up of three lecturers, Agi Putra Kharisma, Aryo Pinandito, and Eriq Muhammad Adams Jonemaro, along with seven Informatics Engineering students, took on the project starting in May 2024. This kind of hands on, applied community service activity is the sort of work regularly carried out by FILKOM's Media, Game and Mobile Technology (MGM) laboratory community.
The team's first phase involved interviews with BKPSDM staff, including computer systems officers, who described specific problems with the existing setup: it could not handle image based or essay questions, could not weight scores differently per question, could not randomize questions and answers, and sometimes confused participants who shared the same name. To address this, the team turned to Moodle, a platform they already knew well from Universitas Brawijaya's own BRONE e-learning system. On September 19, 2024, they traveled to BKPSDM's own CAT laboratory in Malang Regency to configure the software directly on site, working with an architecture of one server serving roughly 40 client computers. Because the lab's server ran Windows, the team used WampServer to run Apache, PHP, and MySQL together.
After configuration came deployment and testing, to confirm the new setup actually worked under real conditions. Agi Putra Kharisma, who led the team, reported that the activity went smoothly and surfaced new ideas that could feed into future community service work with the agency. For the research community around Lab MGM at FILKOM, the project is a concrete example of applied, on the ground collaboration with a local government partner, built through direct development work rather than a signed cooperation agreement.
