Some US Students May Have to Retake Online AP Exams Due to Computer Glitch (cnn.com) 32
"High school students who took Advanced Placement exams online this week may have to do it again next month because of a technical glitch," writes CNN, sharing some of the students' horror stories.
With 45 seconds left in her exam, 11th-grader Maggie McLauchlin of Jacksonville, Florida, took a video of what appears to be a black screen as she tried to upload her exam answers as instructed by The College Board. "I'm trying to take the picture but there's just black and I only have 45 seconds left," Maggie says tearfully. "It's not working..."
Jamye Smith is an AP US History teacher at Fort Zumwalt North High School in O'Fallon, Missouri. She told CNN 27 of her students signed up to take the test. So far she's heard from three students who were unable to submit their exams due to a variety of errors, none of which they caused, she said. Smith said her colleagues teaching other subjects also said their students struggled to do the same.
Because of time zone differences, one American student in Japan had to take his four tests at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. — only to discover that two of them weren't submitted, CNN reports.
"Unfortunately, there isn't another way to submit," the College Board admitted on Twitter, saying they believed the primary cause was outdated web browsers. They told CNN Friday that "After the first few days of testing, our data show the vast majority of students successfully completed their exams, with less than 1 percent [of 1.64 million students] unable to submit their responses..."
"We share the deep disappointment of students who were unable to complete their exam — whether for technical issues or other reasons."
Jamye Smith is an AP US History teacher at Fort Zumwalt North High School in O'Fallon, Missouri. She told CNN 27 of her students signed up to take the test. So far she's heard from three students who were unable to submit their exams due to a variety of errors, none of which they caused, she said. Smith said her colleagues teaching other subjects also said their students struggled to do the same.
Because of time zone differences, one American student in Japan had to take his four tests at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. — only to discover that two of them weren't submitted, CNN reports.
"Unfortunately, there isn't another way to submit," the College Board admitted on Twitter, saying they believed the primary cause was outdated web browsers. They told CNN Friday that "After the first few days of testing, our data show the vast majority of students successfully completed their exams, with less than 1 percent [of 1.64 million students] unable to submit their responses..."
"We share the deep disappointment of students who were unable to complete their exam — whether for technical issues or other reasons."
Cheaters? (Score:2)
I wonder how many people cheated on this. With online unproctored exams here are many ways to cheat and move up scores by some points if you have the resources .. for example you can have someone nearby or maybe watching with cameras who can view the same stuff as you and signal you hints or the answers from time to time for questions you may be unclear on. I am sure many parents would willingly allow it too, since boosting ones scores can help get you into prestigious colleges. I am sure there are 10 times
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Result will be an abnormally high number of cheaters getting into the well resourced top universities and top jobs too.
And they'll be the somewhat more clever cheaters, the ones that were able to spoof the test proctors.
Re:Cheaters? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how many people cheated on this.
The tests were different from normal years. They were "open book, open notes, open web" and designed so those resources would not help so much: focusing more on concepts and less on "facts" that could just be looked up.
The only rule was that you couldn't get live assistance from another person. But there was no way to enforce that, so cheating was likely common.
Only one question at a time was displayed, and once it was answered, you couldn't go back and change it. So you couldn't have the second person work ahead on different problems.
My son took the AP Human-Geo test on Tuesday. There was supposed to be a multiple-choice section and an essay section. Only the essay section was displayed, so he was unable to answer any of the MC questions. The "outdated browser" excuse is nonsense because his browser is the latest Chrome and every single one of his classmates had the exact same problem.
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If the test was that sensitive to an older browser, then the test itself flunked. There's no good excuse for anything like that needing anything like cutting edge browser features.
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Most likely they meant that you had to use an outdated browser, most likely IE6 to do the testing.
Re: Cheaters? (Score:1)
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But there was no way to enforce that, so cheating was likely common.
I'm marking Math assignments this week. Cheating exists, but one thing that is apparent is that it seems no more wide spread than in the past. Kids cheat in classroom tests too.
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Might be add ons, especially ad blocks and privacy enhancements. Even just strict privacy settings in the browser.
Sites that try to force you to do things, to control the browser more than it is supposed to be controllable, tend to break with anything but a default configuration.
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Result will be an abnormally high number of cheaters getting into the well resourced top universities and top jobs too.
These are AP tests not SAT or ACT.
AP test scores are not considered by most university admissions systems. At most, they may be a tie breaker for applicants with similar GPAs and SATs.
The purpose of AP tests is to allow qualified students to skip introductory courses in college. But that is of little benefit if you don't know the material. So there isn't much point in cheating.
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Except that the whole package of academics has to be at the same level. If one is a C student yet slaps out a top score on this test, it won't get one in to Harvard.
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What about the B student. You realize that getting to for B to A is harder than getting from C to B ? Not all students need extreme hand-holding when it comes to cheating.
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With online unproctored exams here are many ways to cheat
What makes you say the exams are unproctored? My wife's a teacher and she's supervising all her online exams via Skype. Sure there's more opportunity to cheat, but in any case it's pretty easy to identify who cheats in an exam. Cheaters typically represent a statistical anomaly to teachers who pretty much can already guess what a student's final grade will be based on how they worked through the semester.
One thing that was identified is that there doesn't seem to be a significant higher number of cheaters i
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You can't proctor over skype. Plus, you are assuming that the cheaters are F students trying to get an A. What about the B student getting an A thanks to a little extra help from the side?
1% (Score:2)
1% seems like a pretty high failure rate if you ask me.
No standards = low standards (Score:1)
Failed the test. (Score:5, Insightful)
Q: Rephrase the statement "our programmers failed the web development test" in a way which doesn't reflect poorly on The College Board.
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They probably didn't test with JavaScript disabled. If you can't navigate your web site with JavaScript disabled, your web site is broken.
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Q: Rephrase the statement "our programmers failed the web development test" in a way which doesn't reflect poorly on The College Board.
No I disagree. Programmers can only really program to standards and not the clusterfuck of what is out there online. If some idiot comes in with IE6 or IE7 and can't submit their work because the website relies on a feature that isn't available then that's not on the programmer. If some student can't submit because their browser's anti advertisement plugin blocked the execution of some script on the page and reloading the page kicked them out of the exam, that's not on the programmer.
We are administering ex
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Advance trial sessions could have prevented this (Score:3)
A week before actual exam, they should have set up regular practice/testing sessions (maybe with no actual questions) to allow students to test and debug their setups to make sure they'll be actually able to do and submit their exams.
Re: Advance trial sessions could have prevented th (Score:1)
Out of date browser? (Score:2)
That being said, what did the test require that had to be handled on an updated browser?
As a general guide line for Web Development, ignore IE and just focus on Firefox / Chromium based browsers, which encompass almost everything, and bonus points for supporting text based browsers like w3m, elinks, links or lynx.
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I was going to make this very comment, but will upmod instead.
For something this important to your paying clients, the College Board should have provided a "test page" a week (or more) in advance that would check to the the extent possible (okay, if someone is screwing with their "user agent" value, that's on them) that the browser is compliant and has has been tested with the AP test software. The test page should also suggest that the user do the appropriate "Help->About" for the platform detected and
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Why not read the user agent and prevent the test from loading on an out of date browser?
Because they were unaware of the problem until after the failures had occurred.
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Might that have been the problem? Are any other browsers likely to both be used and be called outdated?
QA test? (Score:2)
Did they even QA test it?
Glitch? (Score:1)
"We had to fire Billy because his code was always having computer glitches."