@ Pata:

Dear Angie,

I could easily delete your comments or IP block you from this website, but your comments amuse me. One would think that after being mocked for your lack of punctuation, you would at least attempt to get it right in the subsequent comments, but no. No such luck.

Thank you for asking about my accomplishments. I happen to be an educator (I teach a few courses at a local university) and a software engineer. What do you do? Other than posting poorly spelled comments on technology blogs that is?

Anyways, how is Cox Communications treating you? Just had a nice chat with their abuse department. How is the weather in Phoenix?

YOure A MENTALLY DISABLED LOSER!!!! HAHAHHAHAHHAHHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHH AHA>:(

Are you the one child they left behind because you should probably you should stop worrying about my grammatical errors and start worrying about you’re horrible life because face the facts your only accomplishment is probably this idiotic blog oh yeah and only losers have blogs you piece of toxic waste

And you most likely look like gary busey

@ MEh:

Angie, you forgot a terminating period again. Yeah, I know it’s you because you’re using the same IP. Also, hotmail? Really? That’s even worse than AOL!

Also, I think you need to work on your tenses. “I’m sure you meant it.” is probably what you have wanted to say here.

You forgot a capital letter and a comma but I’m sure you mean it

@ Angie:

Angie, please remember you always capitalize the first letter of the sentence. Otherwise it looks like it is a sentence fragment – an unfinished thought if you will.

Secondly, punctuation is your friend. If you skip commas, you change the meaning.

Thirdly, why do you insist that “dumb loser children should not test on paper”? Do you mean only smart children should be allowed to partake in paper based tests? That doesn’t seem fair. Also, I don’t think as educators we are allowed to discriminate against kids based on their intelligence. So yeah, I don’t agree with this point. Or maybe you meant something else… I don’t know. Maybe if there was some sort of punctuation in your sentence I could figure out what you meant.

Also, I noticed you still have an AOL email. This must mean you are a time traveler. I haven’t seen an AOL email in at least a decade. When you go back in time to the 90’s please warn them to fix the housing market so we don’t have a recession now.

Finally, I personally believe that printing tests on paper has negligible effect on the climate compared to corporate emissions. I fully support being environmentally conscious but we should concentrate our efforts on not voting for science-phobic republicans, climate change deniers and urging our government to regulate and enforce Co2 emission control for corporations and subsidize research into alternate, clean energy sources. Then we can talk about harassing educators for using too much paper.

you are a dumb loser children should not test on paper because take in consideration the great improvement it would make on the world’s climate and how it would help the human race YOU STUPID IDIOT!!!!!!>:(

[…] First and foremost, the idea of taking the test via computer vs. pencil and paper. Terminally Incoherent’s blog post about electronic test taking gives some examples as to benefits and pitfalls of these types of tests. Financial justification by the College Board cannot be the only reason to go this route. […]

I tend to prefer paper for exams… not sure why, just prefer putting ink to paper over clicking stuff onscreen for that one use (conversely I’ll open up a Notepad window instead of grabbing a post-it, so paper-love isn’t a general thing for me)

I know one part of our exams in Philosophy this summer is a long essay, which we plan for with 1000 words of written notes, but then type up under supervised conditions… not sure how locked down the computers are, but they’re college PCs which already have fairly tight controls on them, so blocking off the internet or any unwanted programs wouldn’t be hard.

We use electronic testing in law school for our finals. Basically you install a program on your laptop, register it, come test day you download the test through the program, it forces a reboot, and comes up with basically wordpad & disables nearly every keyboard shortcut (except cut/paste) and auxiliary device (e.g. no wifi). It also kills all unknown processes and prevents practically everything from starting up. After the test is over, the computer reboots again, uploads the results as soon as it gets a connection, and you’re done. There is also a manual upload function.

It won’t run in a VM (I tried), it is Windows only, and it doesn’t mind a dual boot. Both the test itself & answers are encrypted in some way. The system is pretty good assuming you’ve got cooperative test-takers (no one wants to risk their course grade over tinkering). I’ve gone into linux by mistake after the second reboot, and looked at the test & such, it seems pretty good.

Our exams are almost exclusively essays, but the system supports multiple choice & short answer too. Blue books are still an option if your computer won’t play nice, or you prefer it. Virtually no one uses them.

Given how slowly I handwrite (compared to typing) it is a no brainer for me. Plus you can edit on a computer, which is great. There is no immediate feedback (though I know what you’re talking about with that, and I hate it), just a clock telling you when you started, how long the test is, and how much time you’ve got left. One day some dlls were missing on my laptop and I had to take my contracts exam by hand. I got a decent grade, but I know editing would’ve made it much better – I always think of things to add partway through the exam.

I’d die if I had to handwrite my finals. Given some essays spill over 7,500 words in 3 hours (lots of writing), whereas others are limited to 200 words in 3 hours (lots of editing) – typing for most students is the only option.