Slashdot Log In
Norway Trying Out Laptops For High School Exams
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 03, 2009 07:20 PM
from the high-school-unmusical dept.
from the high-school-unmusical dept.
The BBC reports that Norway is experimenting with a system that would let secondary school students take their school exams on laptop computers. According to the article, using computers for exams isn't new there, but it's been on fixed machines rather than personal computers that the students can take with them and use for other purposes throughout the school day. Having suffered through three years of exams taken on the awful SoftTest (inflexible, single-platform, ugly, buggy), I hope they do a better job — this is something that is all too easy to get wrong.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Should be from the redundant redundancy dept. (Score:4, Funny)
News: Norway Trying Out Laptops For High School School Exams
Here, let me fix that. Let's go all the way:
News News: Norway Norway Trying Trying Out Out Laptops Laptops For For High High School School Exams Exams
Now you can read the headline in STEREO (be happy it's not quadraphonic or 7.1 surround sound :-)
Re:Should be from the redundant redundancy dept. (Score:4, Funny)
Yo Dawg, we heard you like headlines so we put a headline in your headline so you can read while you read
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Be happy it's not in UHDV's 22.2 channel sound. :P
Well... (Score:5, Informative)
Norway is being very lenient compared to what we have to do when we take standardized tests here in the US.
When it's test taking time; your pockets must be empty of virtually anything and the only items your allowed to have are a #2 pencil and scrap paper. If these rules are violated, it could end up in not just you, but your entire class retaking the test. There are also very strict rules when it comes to seating and going to the bathroom during standardized tests (In general, it's just a big pain in the ass). Kudos to Norway for trying something new.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh. Must suck where you are. I was once asked to take my cellphone out and leave it in a bucket at the front of the class, but they didn't check beyond 'voluntary' compliance.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder what the liability of the school would be if your cellphone came up missing...
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, it's like that here as well. Exam guards are also usually retired teachers, with an attitude like airport security guards: "We'll go through the motions slavisly with no intelligence applied whatsoever". In addition, they are completely illiterate about technology, so their ability to catch actual cheating is probably close to zero.
only on some exams.. (Score:4, Informative)
I think the government is only going to let the students use private laptop on "open book" exams. "Open book" exam is quite popular exam type in Norway, where the focus is not so much on facts, but more on concepts and a very practical approach to the subject. Since there is no facts,there is no need for security since it's very hard to cheat.
I've been through this school-system and I'm no big fan. What usually happens is that it almost impossible to fail an exam, and there is very hard to get a good mark. ( a celebration of mediocracy )
Re:only on some exams.. (Score:5, Interesting)
"I've been through this school-system and I'm no big fan. What usually happens is that it almost impossible to fail an exam, and there is very hard to get a good mark. ( a celebration of mediocracy )"
I beg to differ, regular non-open book exams don't test much of anything. They test how well you can binge and purge and not much else.
The whole exam mindset is flawed IMHO, what students need is ways to integrate and practically apply what they are learning to what they are doing so they DO remember it not just as something taught out of a book, but the can actually go about using it when they want to do something.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that within the rather narrow confines of a school subject that you know thousands of people have done before there's a rather limited number of assignments. Where closed book exams are requiring too much memorization with anything-goes exams many people only become human mixmasters.
You simply take three A-grade exams, stir them together until you won't get caught and paste it in. It becomes sort of a meta-skill applicable on all exams instead of actually learning something on the subject. An
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course this is far harder for a teacher to evaluate than a simple multiple choice exam (I never had a single multipl
Re: (Score:2)
The dark side of the Norwegian system (which you describe correctly) is that teachers get a lot of power of subjective evaluation. This is creeping up even into higher education. In my opinion it is inferior to standardized tests, not necessarily because teachers play favourites, but because their relationship with their students become tainted.
A teacher should be like a defence attorney: one you can trust to be 100% there to help you pass, with as good grades as possible. When they get broad powers to pass
Re: (Score:2)
Since there is no facts,there is no need for security since it's very hard to cheat.
Welcome to #historytest. QOTD: If you don't know it, PM Arne.
whalecatcher1992: Why did the Roman Empire fall again?
Ih8Sweden: East or Wst?
LasseFromNarvik: What's the diff between sine and cosine?
Ih8Sweden: Wrong test N00b
Re: (Score:2)
It is not always a "celebration of mediocracy". It depends on the subject. I have an open book exam on thursday (why am I posting on /. not studying...?) on embedded design. It is considered difficult because it the exam consists of designing solutions and writing ASM code.
As a closed book exam, it would be impossible, unless they gave us all a PIC datasheet as an appendix. The truth is, having the textbook in the exam won't help unless you know what you're doing. People in my class will most likely fail.
Tweaks to the System (Score:4, Interesting)
Some things they might consider rather than key logging is booting from supplied portable media or booting from the network. Using key logging tends to set a bad precedent and the whole of school experience is part of their education, including accepted practices by government and respect for the privacy of individuals.
So boot from network and a quick scan and check, or boot from a cdrom which contains all required software and the exams, it also initiates a system check and then uploads the results to the network. Really easy to do with free open source software but could prove expensive with closed source proprietary software ie licences on top of licences and even 'illegal' in some cases.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes I this is teaching the students exactly what the think the government should be doing and how much it respects the privacy of individuals.
Re:Tweaks to the System (Score:5, Interesting)
The college I went to had us do some exams on our personal laptops. They'd give you a CD to boot from, which put you into a separate OS with no way of accessing the contents of your harddrive or USB drives. You'd then connect to a server to get your particular test. I never heard of anyone finding a way to cheat - excluding the methods that work on pencil & paper tests, of course.
I once tried stealing one of the disks and booting up from a lounge back in my dorm, with text books and a calculator at hand, but they were smart enough to block connections to the test server from outside the testing rooms.
The system can definitely work, when properly implemented.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Boot the CD from VirtualBox?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Only because they're not engineered with subversion in mind. Bluepill is simply a hypervisor, and it's exceptionally difficult to tell if it's running.
Re: (Score:2)
I once tried stealing one of the disks and booting up from a lounge back in my dorm, with text books and a calculator at hand, but they were smart enough to block connections to the test server from outside the testing rooms.
The other thing they could do quite easily is to lock out clients when it is not time to take a particular exam. Back when I was writing software for exam taking (7 years ago) I used tricks like this.
The system can definitely work, when properly implemented.
Absolutely. The main problem has got to be that most of the people writing the software are just not very good programmers. You can't configure and deploy a sow's ear as a silk purse.
They should read Cryptonomicon (Score:2)
Besides, it's ineffective for a sufficiently creative student and I can tell you that some students are very creative when it comes to cheating at exams. I knew guys in college that if they spent as much time studying as they did inventing clever ways of cheating they would have perfect grades.
In Neal Stephenson's
Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
you'd be surprised how many universities make students code on pen and paper for computer programming exams... it's absurd. it's my opinion that they should either give programming projects instead of exams, or if they really want to test the students, then give more conceptual exams that don't require full-on coding.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Ironic (Score:4, Insightful)
Ironically though here at the University of Oslo (capital of Norway) we use pen and paper to do our exams on object oriented java programming (yes, we write code by hand...with a pen...)
I recently had a discussion with a programming lecturer about why they didn't conduct programming exams on a computer. They initially tried doing exams on Java in this manner however it proved to be an ineffective way of assessing a student's knowledge in the programming language since many didn't actually finish all of the exam contents because they had syntax and general compiling/runtime issues in their code preventing the program from actually working as intended. As a result, many lost a large proportion of exam time and marks just trying to get the program to compile and run.
Using the pen and paper approach allows students to just write out code even if it is totally wrong but it does gives the assessor a better idea if they have the right logic in tackling a problem rather than having the right syntax or imported classes and function names (something which can be hard to do on paper for Java admittedly). Having now done several exams using various programming languages I would always take the pen and paper option if I were given a choice.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but even if you had no compiler I'd kill for a text editor. Like "Oh, I need a loop around that - I'll just select those lines and indent them". Doesn't quite work on paper. Never mind search and replace when you find that your variable name doesn't actually reflect its content anymore. Writing essays and stuff on paper is acceptable, but I really can't stand programming on it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not exactly sure why this is being modded funny. Don't get me wrong - I love my highlighted syntax and quick access to reference materials online. I am going to be taking the (nation-wide) AP Computer Science exam on Tuesday. Half of the test consists of writing Java code out - in pencil - onto the exam booklet, and the only reference you're allowed to use is a ridiculously small subset of the standard API.
Re: (Score:2)
First of all, which one? A or AB? (A is like an intro class...)
Second of all, good luck. Took A two years ago, and AB last year.
Third, what's wrong with writing out code? It's not about syntax, and they tell you anything you'd need to memorize... IMHO it's a pretty good way of testing whether somebody really understands what they're doing, if it makes sense to them without intellisense.
Of course, my teacher taught us (on purpose) on JCreator LE, which only has the most basic syntax highlighting (keywords ar
Re: (Score:2)
And how do you compile the code? Do you tear it up in to bite size pieces and masticate a while?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
public static void main( String args[] ) {}
The rest was cake... but I didn't quite understand what all that mumbo jubo was...
my final year in college- one professor had us writing out all sorts of crazy algorithms- some as easy as searching a string, others more complicated assembly programs that took about 8 times reading to understand the problem.
I always felt SO smart coding without a compiler or assem
Money Saver (Score:5, Insightful)
False Client (Score:2)
It is only a matter of time before someone reverses the network protocol they're working with and sends falsified data.
Never trust the client.
Re: (Score:2)
Um... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is this something new?
I had a friend fail a bar exam because of this. (Score:4, Insightful)
A friend of mine took a bar exam in California in 2001 using software. The software corrupted her machine and the "technicians" could not fix it. It took me 1 minute with a dos boot floppy.
Using exam software by people who can't write good code depending on an operating system that is written by people who can't write good code will always be a disaster.
Is it secure? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some documentation would be nice.
The Norwegian Data Inspectorate (datatilsynet) is not to happy about their trials though.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
My security is currently at level 5, but it looks like level 6 is imminent.
Sometimes, security goes all the way to 11.
Re: (Score:2)
Chances are that if a student is bright enough to reverse-engineer their network protocols in order to cheat, s/he should be passing anyways. Doubly so if the password is "pencil" and we soon find ourselves on the brink of WWIII.
But in all seriousness, their client-server auth protocols are such a long-tail problem compared to people alt-tabbing over to Wikipedia that it's pretty much irrelevant. Less so for interacting with the admin interface, but they're probably using something a bit more transactional
Defective by design...maybe? (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the professors at my 4-year college was rather amused by all the concern about cheating and whatnot. He thought the simplest, most foolproof way to see whether people had learned anything or not at the end of their program was to stand them up in front of a few teachers, maybe at a board with a piece of chalk when appropriate, and have them answer some questions.
Another professor at the same school, when he had small classes of 10-15 people, would once or twice per class period pick somebody to come work an example problem from the material from recent classes. Personally, I found that a pretty good reason to keep up with the class material instead of just cramming at the end before the exam.
It seems to me that by the time we've paid for custom anti-cheating software, plagiarism detection software, continual redesign of standardized exams, and all the security around standardized exams, we could have just paid for a video camera, some chalk, a chalkboard, and good local teachers to do some sort of individual testing.
But then, I personally think that standardized tests are mainly good for measuring how good you are at taking standardized tests, and not much else, so I guess I'm a bit biased.
Re: (Score:2)
This was basically what they did at my college, too, for important projects. You handed in stuff, and a couple of weeks later you were called in to answer some basic questions about what you'd written. No grades on the second test, it was purely to catch mindless plagiarism.
Windows lock-in? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
"A fair number of schools use MACs. Those are mainly used in schools with emphasis on creative arts."
Blech! Been there, done that, it's even worse. You haven't seen an ugly user interface until you have seen early Finale on an old PowerPC mac.
Why not? (Score:2, Interesting)
My experience from Denmark: computers are fine! (Score:3, Informative)
Hi all. I thought I'd chip in with my experience.
In High School ("gymnasiet"), we were allowed to user computers for all written exams (that I attended; IIRC; maybe except math).
The protocol was this: you would get your problem set (i.e. five texts and two pictures, "write an essay about [...]"). You wrote some words, either on paper or on your computer. If you wrote on your computer, you'd print the document and put it in your handed-out blank A3 sheets (folded to four A4 pages, put prints in the middle). It was your own responsibility to have a working computer and printer.
Note that this was in 2002; most people brought desktop boxes. I don't recall wireless networking being the hip shit back then.
In math we were allowed to use calculators that couldn't perform "abstract symbol manipulation". Our (turing-complete...) TI-83 was allowed. [a part of the exam was "no-aids"; no calculator there, only pen(cil) and paper].
In music (given a melody, make an arrangement), we were allowed to use software from a whitelist; the whitelist was based on the capabilities of the software (it wasn't allowed to do our jobs for us).
In general, I didn't notice any problems regarding the use of computers.
Fast forward to university (I'm doing CS and math). The Introduction to Programming exam was done on the university's computers, with electronic hand-in. You'd get a problem set instructing you to write a simple class or two and a for/while loop iterating over some collection. When you'd hand in, you'd copy the files somewhere on the network. ISTR that you were allowed to bring your own computer if you wanted, but being connected to the network was your own responsibility then.
There were generally no problems there.
For all other exams, either you weren't allowed to bring your computers, or you weren't allowed to bring a printer (so there'd be no point). One exception was the statistics course. the kind of problems we'd face was easy to predict, so one of my fellow students wrote a program which would solve 90% of the problem set for him, generating some nice LaTeX. He'd then copy this to paper by hand, and work on the remaining 10%.
My experience: using computers as a "smart typewriter" works great. Using computers as a "smart typewriter" for music notation works fine as well (and hey, midi keyboards are easier to lug around than pianos).
Using them as "smart typewriters" with a Java development environment and a "smart mailman" (network handin) works fine too. Were the possibilities for cheating there? Sure, draw a map of the computers and their names; ssh into the host of your friend; start talk(1)ing. So what? If you need to cheat on your first quarter course, chances are you'll EPIC FAIL some other course heading your way. And there were TAs walking around, glancing at your screen every now and then.
Using them to solve the exam problems, when you write the solving software yourself, works great too; if it was someone else's software, it'd be a little is-it-cheating iffy.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I took tests on stone tablets. So, get off my lawn.
Stone tablets? STONE TABLETS???? LUXURY!!!!!
When I did my tests we didn't have stone tablets. Only the professor had them! We had to scratch our answers in the mud or dirt! And if it rained we had to repeat the whole year!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on mods, at least give us all an offtopic.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Stone tablets? Writing! When I did my tests you had to sing the entire oral canon while accompanying yourself on a lute!
A lute? A LUTE??? LUXURY!!!!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Computers are slow to put the information in (typing) but fast to retrieve (searching). Paper is the opposite: quick to enter (writing) and slow to retrieve (filing).
>
Are you saying writing is *faster* than typing? Seriously? Few people can handwrite at faster than around 35WPM (I can't handwrite faster than about 10 sustained without hurting myself, but I'm special like that), whereas even a mediocre typer can get 45, and a professional typist can usually get above 100. So what in God's name are you talking about?
Re: (Score:2)
Norway? More like Snore-way!
(Got lions and tigers only in Kenya!)