ELTE Passes Its Sustainability Exam with Flying Colors

02.07.2025.

The Faculty of Economics at ELTE has won an international award for its sustainable, digitalized exam system. The paperless exam center handles several hundred thousand exams a year in an automated, environmentally friendly way. The innovation reduces the workload for instructors and ensures equal opportunities. The development delivers exemplary savings and efficiency in higher education.

The ELTE Faculty of Economics won the prestigious Quality Innovation Award for its development based on the digitalization and optimization of its exam management system. The Faculty received this international recognition in the “Educational Innovations” category for its project Sustainable University, which was selected as one of 23 winners out of 557 applicants.

The centerpiece of the award-winning innovation is the Faculty’s self-financed, paperless, and energy-efficient exam center, which enables the administration of around 288,000 exams annually in a unified, automated manner. The center operates with a closed IT system consisting of 200 workstations that use low-power Raspberry Pi computers, privacy-screen monitors, digital drawing tablets, and approved calculators. The system ensures data protection and exam security through automated reboots and monitoring tools.

The development represents not only a technological innovation but also an organizational transformation: to reduce instructors’ workload, the operational tasks of exam administration are carried out by a dedicated organizational unit. Automation of scheduling, room allocation, and supervision enables efficient exam delivery and statistical analysis, supporting objective feedback on teaching performance. Accessibility was also a major focus during development: the center uses regulatory and technical solutions that allow students with special needs to take exams on equal terms.

The exam center’s operation results in annual savings of about 100 million forints and is also significant from a sustainability perspective: it saves more than 5.5 tons of paper annually, its energy consumption is extremely low, the building uses LED lighting, and its heating/cooling system is environmentally friendly.

The project also won the 2024 National Quality Innovation Award, as decided by the EOQ Hungarian National Committee, which enabled it to compete internationally. In that competition, the Resource Optimization of University Exams to Improve Service Quality at ELTE Faculty of Economics project won the Quality Innovation Award 2024 in the Educational Innovations category. The award was presented in Budapest on May 28, 2025, where Zsuzsanna Eszter Tóth, Vice Dean for Education of the Faculty of Economics, represented the institution.

A video presenting the exam center: