The examination room of the future - today!

Posted on Thursday 14 December 2006

The first national on-line examination using privacy filters has taken place at Farnborough Sixth Fo

An assessment first for Farnborough Sixth Form College

 

On Wednesday 13 December at Farnborough Sixth Form College eighty students took their IT Key Skills – Level 2 exams. Nothing unusual about that, you may say, but all the students were in the same room and sitting next to each other completing the assessment on-line. What made this different was the use of privacy filters to prevent learners seeing each other’s work.

 
The idea for the use of privacy filters in examinations arose from a chance conversation between the College Principal, Dr John Guy, and a senior executive of a mobile phone company who, as is customary in the business field, used privacy filters to prevent industrial espionage when travelling on aeroplanes. Neighbours in adjacent seats are unable to read a laptop screen with a privacy filter in place. Their application to on-line examinations in schools and colleges in the UK is novel and the College has pioneered their use to enable assessments of large groups of students to take place in the same location, at the same time.
 
To get to this point a great deal of work had been completed by the college to link with the awarding body software and to ensure that the college network was not overloaded. Dr Mike Docker, Director of ICLT, and his team have worked closely with OCR, so the Key Skills test was as much a trial of the College system and technical support as any of the students.
 
Dr Docker said, “The new e-assessment centre at the College was built with this sort of testing in mind and today was the first opportunity to put it through its paces”.
 
“Having successfully completed our first large scale trial we are looking to capitalise on this with three sessions in a single day in the January 2007 session of testing”, he added.
 
Watched by representatives from Becta, senior staff from awarding bodies and industry, the run-up to the test and the subsequent exam was completed with no problems experienced by the students or the system. Farnborough succeeded in demonstrating that large scale on-line testing is a realistic possibility in a normal workshop environment using privacy filters.
 
There is more work to be done before the method can be used more widely and new protocols will be needed for invigilation and registering students for their exams. However, the viability of using this method of assessment has now been established at Farnborough. This is an important development reflected in the national interest and the presence of a team from the BBC who were anxious to record the moments up to the start of the exam.
 
College Principal Dr John Guy said, “This has been a major success for the College team who have worked up the idea from its conception to the practical reality”.


Click here to view the BBC clip as a QuickTime video.