Prevent saving to C: for controlled assessments

[LinkZ]

I am trying to get our machines ready for running controlled assessments, part of my plan involves having separate user accounts for the controlled assessment users with a home drive mapped to a network location where students save their work to and we will be disabling the user accounts out of exams hours, however I am currently struggling with the issue of preventing the students from saving to the C: drive. I am using the usual group policies to prevent windows explorer access to C: (User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer > Hide these specified drives in My Computer & Prevent access to drives from My Computer) however this does not stop students from typing in a path manually in Word or Notepad, such as in the save as dialog typing c:\windows\temp\mywork.docx

 

My concern with this is students entering the classroom for their first controlled assessment session and completing their work, then in-between sessions having access to the computer and making modifications to their work on the local disk and copying it onto their network drive during their next controlled assessment session.

 

Due to the large number of potential folders and the impact it would have on Windows I can't modify the access rights to the folders in Windows, I am also unable to re-image the machines at the end of the exam session due to the rooms being general teaching rooms and the imaging process potentially taking 3 hours.

 

How are you setting computers up for controlled assessments or has it just been deemed an acceptable risk due to the low number of students who would exploit this?

[AJWhite1970]

Have you also removed "run" from the start menu? Pretty sure disabling that also disables being able to type in UNC or local paths in any location/address bar

[Guest Guest]

What version of Windows is this on? As Windows 10 has a mode specifically for exams

[matt40k]

On older versions of Windows you'd just set the app as the "Custom User Interface", hide all the drives, set the proxy etc for a dedicated exam user account.

[LinkZ]

Have you also removed "run" from the start menu? Pretty sure disabling that also disables being able to type in UNC or local paths in any location/address bar

 

I hadn't done this but i've added that to the group policy now and it unfortunately hasn't stopped it.

 

We're using Windows 10 Education and I have seen the exam mode however from what I can gather this is mostly to enable you to launch an individual web page. The issue with controlled assessments is the students need to be able to use multiple products from the office suite (so for example the controlled assessment we have coming up soon uses both Word and Access) and the students will need to save this work to a network drive so I can't just run the machine in a sort of kiosk mode as the issue is in the save menu from these and other applications.