Locking Down Windows 7 Exam User

[Hiran]

Currently, we have exam users set up/locked down to not save to local disk, spell/grammar check disabled in Word and home drive pointing to a network location for the exam moderators to manage the work. Is this best practice for exam user accounts? If not, please help me to configure an 'exam board compliant' user.

[Steve21]

Depends on each exam board and the requirements they ask for. Some allow internet some don't, some require double line spacing etc other's don't etc.

 

Really you need to have a check through each board and see what you need, then setup accounts or GPOs for each one to assign depending on which exam they're taking

 

Steve

[Hiran]

Thank you for your reply.

 

Well, most/if not all our exam users require a laptop for just word processing. They wouldn't need internet etc. But, would you recommend allowing to save to local disk as sometimes moderators forget to save to the homedrive and being a temp user all changes are lost upon login.

[Guest obsidianpillar]

There was a thread a few years ago (probably one of many) which discussed controlled assessments and their best practices in relation to GPO setup etc. I think it was me (or someone else!) who posted a long list of stuff to check. Try searching for 'Controlled Assessment Best Practice' and see what comes up?

[PlantHead]

We use a separate wifi router and connect the clients to that for printing etc. - if they don't need internet access. If they need internet access we build our laptops with different boot partitions to fulfill the reqs. and then physically connect the wifi router to our internet

eg. Part1 - Internet and word

Part2 - No wordprocessing

Part3 - Wordprocessing

 

The exam officer is responsible for booting to the correct partition before the exam.

We tried setting each exam laptop up to save to a shared storage area on the network but found that it was best to get them to save to their desktop and then print from there.

[jthompson]

We use batches of accounts similar to regular student accounts that save work to a mapped home drive on the network. I prefer that to having work saved locally. It provides the option to continue working on a different machine if something goes wrong, and staff can more easily access the work if need be. Also, some exams are run over multiple sessions, so it avoids complications there.

We have Internet access configurable using a security group membership in AD, and Office proofing tools can be disabled/locked down using a GPO. Accounts have restricted logon hours and are disabled after the exam ends. Each candidate in an exam will have their own account assigned to them, all with unique passwords. Each subject will have a batch of numbered accounts that we recycle or add to as required (e.g. exam.sci0123, exam.geo0012, etc.). We therefore have to provide a list of names and account details prior to an exam.

 

Any other exam requirements are managed via invigilators (such as instructions to set up headers and footers, etc.).