QCA Online Exams

I want to have a moan and I’m not sure were to start.  Maybe a link to the last post on this subject – http://tmcd35.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/fighting-the-boredom/.  I think I made my feeling clear then how much I hate this software.

Today was the first practice exam for the Chemistry paper.  The actual exam is next week.  An additional practice session is planned for Tuesday.  My god did it all go tits!

Let’s start with the computers. Slow.  1.2Ghz Celerons with 256mb Ram.  It doesn’t help the kids being so very impatient.  If a program doesn’t load instantly they’ll click on the icon 5 times in rapid succession.  If it still doesn’t open they’ll click again, and again and again.  The online exam software doesn’t display anything for a good minute even on the fastest of machines.  This coupled with it only liking one copy loading without displaying a very unhelpful – ‘program is busy please try later’ – message and we have a reciepe for disaster.

Lesson 1 – have the computers logged on and the exam softare loaded BEFORE the kids enter the classroom.  This means going round all 30 PC’s and getting them running.  I’d lay money on half the kids sitting in front of the computer and logging it off straight away.

The next issue is when they did finally get the exam software running it wouldn’t let them take a practise test.  The practise paper is downloaded to the machine (I did that last night/first thing this morning).  The option to log on to practise is on the screen.  The test listed.  But no deal – ‘test not assigned by server’.  WTF, only supposed to do that for the real test.

So for Wednesday I had to assign pupils to the practise exam and schedule an official run time on the server for the practise session.  Now thie kids taking the exam are the same group that spectacularly failed to take the Physics and Chemistry modules back in Easter so they are already registered on the system in their class groups.

But for this software that’s not good enough!  No, to assign them to a Biology exam the kids need to be assigned to a seperate Biology class that has the rights to sit the exam.  I can’t add Biology to the exiting class groups.  So this is done ready for Wednesday.

To make matters worse the official exam is on Monday.  The exam paper will not be available to download until Friday.  On Friday I have to manually run a pdate on the server to download the exam paper to the server.  Then I need to go round all 60 PC’s being used on Monday and manually download the paper from the server to the local client.  WTF – this is 21st century IT?  Where ths software automation.

Oh yes, I remember – RM’s take on software automation.  It’s supposed to be able to do it but don’t rely on it.  If you try to send the client or exam papers through .msi they’d likely turn up on the client corrupt.