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Norway Trying Out Laptops For High School Exams

Posted by timothy on 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.

4 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Tweaks to the System by rtb61 · · Score: 3, 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.

    --
    Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    1. Re:Tweaks to the System by artor3 · · Score: 4, 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.

  2. Is it secure? by antikristian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They use a software called MAS from a company called 3AMI (3AMI.com) I personally think it's a bad idea though to use propriatary software that doesn't even specify what level of security it practices between client and server. (oh nevermind, it requires a "password", it must be secure)

    Some documentation would be nice.

    The Norwegian Data Inspectorate (datatilsynet) is not to happy about their trials though.

    --
    A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
  3. Re:only on some exams.. by Anonymous Coward · · 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.