Norway Trying Out Laptops For High School Exams

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.

Comments

Should be from the redundant redundancy dept.

[tomhudson]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo Dawg, we heard you like headlines so we put a headline in your headline so you can read while you read

Well...

[XPeter]

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.

only on some exams..

[Anonymous Coward]

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..

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Ironic

[googlesmith123]

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...)

Re:Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Money Saver

[Sir Holo]

This will be a real money-saver, because paper is becoming very expensive.

Defective by design...maybe?

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

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:Tweaks to the System

[artor3]

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.