Norway Trying Out Laptops For High School Exams 120
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.
Money Saver (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ironic (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.
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.
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.
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:Ironic (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.
Windows lock-in? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Computers... Pfft... (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on mods, at least give us all an offtopic.
Re:Computer obession (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).
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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?