[wrp]

Survey question: To what extent did blue book exams go away?

When I started out (and the original Van Halen was still together), blue book exams were the norm in humanities classes. I've had narrow experience with American undergrad classes the past 25 years, so I don't have a feeling for how things have evolved.

[ipcress_file]

I've never stopped using them, with the exception of the pandemic year, when we were forced to run online exams.

Why replace a system that generally works well with one that introduces additional potential problems?

[MikeTheGreat]

Same here.

Online instruction / learning can work for some people, and that's good.

I don't understand how anyone ever thought that an online exam could be made secure. There's just no way to ensure that the person who registered for the course is the one taking the exam when you don't control anything about the hardware or location, when students have a wide variety of hardware that you must support, and any attempt at remove video monitoring of the exam immediately runs into scalability and privacy issues. Like, even if you're watching a video of the person taking the online exam, how do they prove that they didn't just hook up an extra keyboard, mouse and (mirrored) monitor for person #2 to take the exam for them while they do their best to type and/or mouse in a convincing way?

It also doesn't help that you periodically get students who will try to wheedle, whinge, and weasel their way into an online exam, but then bomb the in-person exam (it's so strange and totally unrelated that they really, really wanted to take an online exam instead of in-person!).

Ok, I'll stop ranting now :)

[nlawalker]

Chiming in here just because I happen to have taken a handful of online-proctored certification exams through Pearson OnVUE recently.

The gist of it is that I think someone willing to put a lot of work in could probably cheat using the strategies you suggest, but it would be a pain. During your checkin you have to send a selfie, photos of the front and back of your photo ID, and four photos of the space you've prepared. You can't have any writing tools, written materials, or anything else that looks like a computer or screen in the area, and the machine you're on has to be single-screen. If the pre-test greeter or the proctor aren't satisfied with what they see they can ask you (via text and voice chat) to show them the room in real time via your webcam and may ask you to make changes or move things around to provide evidence that something in the room is not hiding mechanisms used to cheat. From that point on, your webcam and mic are on and live streaming to the proctor for the duration of the test; they don't say anything about assistive technologies on their end but I assume they are using eye tracking to look for instances of eyes wandering offscreen for a protracted period of time. The test environment software effectively "takes over your PC" during the test and I would imagine is pretty effective at detecting alternate/multiple display outputs etc.

There are probably scalability issues, but privacy is not an issue from the perspective of the proctor - you are effectively surrendering it by agreeing to take the test online, you could have gone to a test center instead.

[MikeTheGreat]

I'm curious what the live video stream captures. Is it you, your desk, and several feet around you (i.e., enough to confirm that there's nothing else near you)? It seems like they need enough to do ongoing, real-time confirmation that your workspace keeps matching the still images you sent in.

FWIW the 'privacy' concern is often voiced by students who find the test proctoring intrusive. On the one hand I agree it's intrusive but on the other hand it seems reasonable for the short-ish amount of time (several hours) that they'll be taking the test.

I'm guessing that some fraction of the students complaining about privacy genuinely object to the privacy issues, some folks may object to having to pay a fee for the oversight, and some fraction are objecting in an attempt to get the oversight removed so they can cheat. I'm sure there's overlap, and other reasons that I haven't thought of.

The scalability problem(s) comes from the need to have a human watching each student take the test. The more people each watcher needs to watch the less effective they'll be, but the lower the watcher-student ratio is the more expensive it will be. Especially since a good fraction of the students won't cheat (so you'll be paying people to watch students not cheat for several hours).

[nlawalker]

The testing app shows you your video stream in real time, it's relatively tightly zoomed and cropped to your face. This is what leads me to believe that they rely heavily on eye tracking (and sound, they require that your mic be capturing too) to look for suspicious behavior. I'm not sure, because it's never happened to me, but I believe the proctor has the ability to interrupt your test and request that you show them the room.

The requirement is that you remain in place and keep your face on camera for the duration of the test, but depending on the test there's an "unscheduled break" functionality that will let you take an unsupervised break, at the cost of locking you out of all of the questions you have already seen on the test so far.

Pearson OnVUE: https://www.pearsonvue.com/us/en/test-takers/onvue-online-pr...

Microsoft-specific documentation of the online testing process: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/credentials/certifications...

[ipcress_file]

I get it. My major concern was that students were cheating online (nearly 50% if I was detecting them all) who I didn't think would have cheated in the classroom. I didn't like the idea that we were creating a situation that enticed students to cheat.

That being said, the whole experience had an impact on my generally optimistic view of human nature.

[msgodel]

The way you do online exams is by contracting other universities proctored test centers and making students attend the nearest one on exam day.

There's a whole system for this, it already works very well if people actually wanted to make online exams work. Of course it's not "social distancing" so it didn't help with covid.

[MikeTheGreat]

For what it's worth I've tried that (here in WA state, in the US) and most colleges (including mine) don't have a test proctoring center. Occasionally you'll find one but the center will frequently will only proctor tests for their own college (i.e., it's not public service - it's just for that college).

So here in WA, USA there's definitely a system for this. If you don't mind sharing - where do you live? Have you used this proctoring-for-other-colleges system? How do you know about it?

[msgodel]

People often say Virginia has a lot of good universities and I always thought they were overstating it. Maybe they're right.

Both the University I attended and the ones near my home town proctored tests for the public. I actually used that service very heavily in high school to test out of ~50 hours of gened classes.

[BrenBarn]

I'm not sure, but I used them as recently as 2019. (Well, not a blue book per se, but a printed exam where students handwrote their answers on the provided sheets.) I'm pretty sure some faculty never stopped using them except when forced to by online classes. (Incidentally, increased pressure to offer more online classes is a worrisome combination with increased AI-aided cheating.)

[jccalhoun]

I was an English major and Math minor in the 90s and I used them for one class - a history general studies requirement. All the essay tests in my other classes were on letter sized paper with blank space for us to write in.

[wrp]

You raise a good point. I've assumed that "blue book exam" is used as a generic term for in-class tests that consist of just essays, not necessarily using the physical Blue Books that you buy at the campus bookstore.