Thursday, December 07, 2006

how exactly does this benefit students?

Last spring, the law school decided to get with the times and allow students to take exams on laptops. In addition to allowing students to turn in legible exams, you could run a quick spellcheck before turning in the exam, since it was done through Word.

They tell us this year that we *have* to download new exam software to take the exam. And - bonus - this version of the exam software doesn't include the option to spellcheck work before turning it in. So just like the handwritten exams, you have to sit there and go through line-by-line to make sure that everything is spelled correctly. Anyone that has ever tried to edit anything while it's still on a laptop screen knows that it's enough to drive you insane.

I'm trying to think of the rationale for this, and the only thing I can come up with is that it's not fair to the three kids in the entire law school who don't want to type their exams. The administration can't even use the "just like the real world" justification that seems to be used for everything we do, because even *real* lawyers at least get their secretaries to hit the spellcheck button before printing out their briefs.

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4 Comments:

At 9:16 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

if you actually took the time to read rather than jumping to negative conclusions, as always, you would have seen they omitted spell check because it causes 1 in 12 students' computers to crash

 
At 9:57 AM, Blogger Dangerous Mind said...

My point is that it puts those students whose professors use spelling errors to distinguish an A- from a C+ in a really tough position.

And for the record, I did read - several times - and found nothing in any e-mail or on the law school website stating that fact.

 
At 1:38 PM, Blogger Some Girl said...

My law school does the same thing, and their rationale, really, is that it's not fair to the other students who want to write.

Those bastards.;P

 
At 8:28 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"NOTE: It has been found that the spell check version of Securexam is not stable and crashes for about 1 in 12 students. The version that we currently have for download is the NO spell check version. Secure exam is working on the spell check issue and we'll post the spell check version when it is stable." Securexam Installation Instructions. Maybe your C+ stems from inability to read instructions not from spell check.

 

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