DeSAT: Towards Transparent and Decentralized University Counselling Process

The admission process in academic institutions (universities, colleges, etc.) is more digitized than ever. Starting from standardized tests to application processing, to shortlisting on the basis of merit, to even document verification, everything is carried out through online processes now. However, in spite of having huge benefits in terms of convenience, existing admission processes severely lack transparency. The entire process is dependent on certain central authoritative entities such as the testing authorities followed by the institutes themselves. Moreover, critical tasks such as verifying educational and identity-related documents of students is a tedious affair and the effort is duplicated across all institutions. In this work, we attempt to overcome these limitations of the existing workflow of academic institutes' admission process by designing a distributed ledger based framework that involves the academic institutes, testing authorities, document and credential validators, as well as the students. Our framework DeSAT uses verifiable credentials together with a permissioned ledger to remove the duplicate efforts in verification of test scores as well as validation of students' documents. In addition, it makes the entire process transparent and auditable while enforcing fair merit-based seat allotment through smart contracts. Through a prototype implementation using Hyperledger Fabric, Indy, and Aries, we demonstrate the practicality of DeSAT and show that our system offers acceptable performance while scaling with the number of participating institutions.