We've conducted several exams already. Last year we first though about grading mostly by take-home exercises, but the percentage of blind copy +paste was unacceptable, and we were forced to perform lots of exams, sometimes not on the best possible conditions.
* In a room where Sage is installed locally and no folder is mounted remotely, we simply unplug the internet cable. If the room is full and the students are too close, and we need two versions of the exam. * We used several times a lab under our control that has a server for the students home folders, so we cannot unplug. We polished a firewall to make sure they don't have internet, they can't share their home folders with the others, and maybe some other stuff. We also log everything. * We also used a lab where we could see almost all students screens at once. The instalation is local but for some reason we couldn't unplug the cable. However I don't get the impression they copied a lot. * The most crazy time was a exam where the only lab available had very old computers, so we had to use a server. I wrote a firewall to allow only access to the server and kept the log from the server to check no two students would login to the same account (and logged in as admin to check no worksheet was shared). However I didn't set the ulimits right, and when a certain number of students launched their buggy code the server ran out of RAM, so I didn't really follow the protocol. Those students were not very techy or may be they were just honest, but we don't think they copied either. So for various circumstances we weren't always safe and got some attempts to copy, some of which we couldn't really prove. If you have logs to show it, it's ok, but it's better not to give them the chance. The most obvious thing to check is the internet connection. If you can unplug the internet connection, that'll make for the most smooth exam. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en.
