Dreaded Exam Month !

[MrWu]

Hi all

 

How do you prepare for exam month?

 

As we all know there is no such thing as it will all work 100 percent without fail during exams so I prepare as much as possible for things to fail.

Our exams suffer with rooming so we have to roam around the school borrowing PCs from ICT rooms which sometimes struggle to prepare to a level we are happy with.

 

Recently, we have bought brand new laptops with SSD and imaged to Windows LTSC so that a temporary office can be setup for exams, as usual we have exams account via GPO locking things down, impero so we can access remotely to support if need be, a brand new printer(s) mapped so they can print exam work, and examwordpad autosaving to Home drives by default, an invigilator account to access the home drives to extract work in case student crashes etc. have spare laptops all PCs in each room to fall back on as well.

 

Yet, things still go wrong and exam officer gets unhappy, so meetings ahead to see if we can make it bullet proof. I have been off for a week so statiscally 18 PCs/Laptops there were 3 incidences over 4 days (2 laptop crashes, and one not loading the examwordpad shoutcut requiring a reboot to restore) all issues was restored, couple of students had extended time but this could be due to invigilator trying to sort it out himself as to not bother us or the exam itself too much.

 

One issue I can see is us setting up temp network for these laptops via small switches which might cause network issues, but putting in a HP Edge switch gets noisey!

 

So is the reliability satisitics still not up to snuff? Would you connect the equipment to the network at all anyway (Im thinking we can print and save to network) - is there anything more contigencies I can build in?

 

Thanks as always

Edited May 17, 2019 by MrWu

[PotNoodleTech]

All our exams are connected to the network - they actually just use bog standard IT suites for the main batches of online testing which are block booked as an when required. All machines have SSDs are are generally reliable. Me and my tech usually poke our heads in and give the room a once over before the exam. I ask the exams officer to give me a full timetable of what support is needed when and we then try and stay in our office during the exams and as you said monitor actively with impero.

 

I would not set up a separate system - it just over complicates things, and over complication = unreliability. Just use your existing fully working reliable system and tweak the GPO etc to lock things down however your exams officer needs it.

 

I do have a couple of offline laptops with the WAN cards removed and no software other than Notepad on there for exams which require just the ability to type with no possibility of internet and spell checks.

 

One thing is for sure though - paper and pen is more reliable and repeatable! The most problems we have had has not been with equipment at all. but rather the exam websites out on the internet having issues / losing sessions / going down.

[bossman]

In 20 years of our systems being in place we have only ever suffered one moment due to our ISP (Local Authority) internet connection going offline during one exam hence we moved directly to BT immediately....

 

Since then we have never had any problems with online exams or any exams taken on computers....

 

Guess we just lucky I suppose rather than just good management of the systems....(Me being modest)...

[noelmm]

We have a set of 15 dedicated laptops for exams which are on the domain so we can use Group Policy to lock everything down. Just like you we use ExamWritepad however we save to the local D drive so that if the network should go down the student wouldn't even notice as once the laptops are logged in the network is not required.

 

When it comes to printing each student copies their file onto a pen drive and prints it to a local printer connected to a dedicated laptop. Only when the document is printed and student and invigilator is happy the document is deleted from both the pen drive and local D drive.

[MrWu]

thanks guys I think it's mainly down to print dialogue coming up and it sits behind the examwritepad screen and would not go into focus for the candidate to click YES.

 

At the moment I'm using Impero to close the print dialogue behind and it closes the print dialogue freeing examswritepad up again...

[munkey]

We use a load of exam login thats heavily locked down with GP. Passwords are changed after each exam and staff can pull the files off after.

 

Ever since upgrading to Windows 10 1809 last month i'm now having a war with mandatory automatic restarts within active hours that cannot be postponed or aborted. I had some laptops rebooting during exams which as you can imagen was not acceptable...

Time to disable WSUS and do termly updates I think

[kennysarmy]

Never had any major problems in 20 years.

 

Some students have e-accounts if they need to use WP's for their exams - they just use PC's in small offices or laptops; e-accounts are locked down to just the apps they require.

 

This year the CiDA exam went well again - they just use a couple of IT Suites which we check over the day before, but the staff are generally good at reporting issues anyway.

[Sonic007]

Luckily more and more exams are web based and we warn our students that if they do divert from the test it will cause a test violation and waste their time. The software picks up things like this.

 

With other exams its hit and miss, we used to use impero to control everything but then there would always be a few machines which wouldnt be happy.

 

Oh and then there would be the teachers that would tell you they have an exam in the IT suite and need this software installing the night before.