Sketching a Backend for Language Placement Tests

5 October 2017
By Quinn Schiller

Sometimes, projects come around that DataSquad can’t directly contribute to because the scope of the project is longer than the time any one student will stay at the school. But just because we can’t work on the project doesn’t stop us from offering support.

The language department approached DataSquad for advice on how to build visualizations to show the skills of incoming language students who take a language placement test. We aren’t able to directly build the visualizations but from our experience, we know the kind of backend we would want to query to build graphs from to meet their criteria.

I sketched out a prototype for the actual development team to use as a base when they build their database. This prototype will ensure that the final database is queryable in a way that is a fast and flexible fit for the end goal of the project.

A schema (a blueprint) for the backend database for the language test
The rough draft of the schema the language test will use