Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam

If learning is the goal, and we just learned that we need to do more work to provide an experience conducive to learning, then the cost for learning just increased.

First, its interesting to see a situation where a new technology INCREASED the cost of something.

    Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience.
    When I had 200 linear algebra exams to grade at once

Second, this is alluding to one of the dimensions along which that cost is going to be born, staffing. If its too many papers to grade, then more staff are needed to grade them.

We're probably not going to get that, though, and instead the cost increases, the funding stays the same, so the quality will decline to compensate.

So it goes...

The OP was saying that paid student proctors couldn’t possibly be caring. I pointed out that most of the student assistants in similar positions were in fact very caring.

Store in each classroom a custom-made rack for the laptops (with at least one laptop per seat plus backups). Distribute the laptops at the start of exams and collect them at the end.

The rack charges the laptops, streamlines distributing/collecting tests, prevents tampering, and reports defects. A professor uploads the test to their LMS and specifies the exam time-frame and location. Before the exam, the LMS transfers the test to the correct rack, which saves it to the laptops. After the exam, the rack loads the student responses and transfers them to the LMS for the correct class. Each laptop has a light under it whose color indicates whether it's in standby, waiting to be distributed (shortly before exam start), has a submitted test, or is malfunctioning (the rack periodically pings laptops in storage to verify they still work). Multiple professors can queue exams to the same location, in different time-frames, and the LMS and rack know when to prepare each test on the laptops.

The hard part is to implement this well. The rack's hardware and software must be reliable; nonetheless it will fail (hardware breaks), and exams get moved and rescheduled, so there must be a way to transfer tests to another classroom and time-slot. The laptops can have slightly less reliability, since there are backups; but failures can't be clustered, and if a laptop is transferred from another rack during an exam, it should download the destination rack's test and become active (so if one rack's backup laptops run out, laptops can be borrowed from other classrooms). The laptops must periodically backup in-progress tests using wifi or bluetooth, and if a laptop breaks during the exam, the student can resume their progress on another. Tests must be downloaded well before exam time, in case there are problems (laptops should be able to store and queue multiple tests). Laptops must handle exams that start late (up to the official exam end time) and end late (including overlapping the next exam's start time, in which case the next exam is loaded when the laptop is put back into the rack). The rack must absolutely not indicate that a laptop is ready with an exam if it's not; and (since tests are downloaded before exam time) nothing unique should happen at exam start time (to reduce last-minute surprises, and let a professor who isn't convinced take out a laptop and check that it's functional 15 minutes before). Last but certainly not least, the UI to submit tests and grade responses should be intuitive, simple (not overwhelming) yet powerful (can handle edge-cases like rescheduled tests, randomized tests, accommodations; or be extensible enough to support these features).

Despite all the above requirements I actually think such a product is feasible. Unfortunately, with firsthand experience of typical EdTech and academic bureaucracy (and I'm not a professor so I don't know the worst of it), I'm skeptical it would be adequate quality unless the company designing it is uniquely motivated and capable.

Chiming in here just because I happen to have taken a handful of online-proctored certification exams through Pearson OnVUE recently.

The gist of it is that I think someone willing to put a lot of work in could probably cheat using the strategies you suggest, but it would be a pain. During your checkin you have to send a selfie, photos of the front and back of your photo ID, and four photos of the space you've prepared. You can't have any writing tools, written materials, or anything else that looks like a computer or screen in the area, and the machine you're on has to be single-screen. If the pre-test greeter or the proctor aren't satisfied with what they see they can ask you (via text and voice chat) to show them the room in real time via your webcam and may ask you to make changes or move things around to provide evidence that something in the room is not hiding mechanisms used to cheat. From that point on, your webcam and mic are on and live streaming to the proctor for the duration of the test; they don't say anything about assistive technologies on their end but I assume they are using eye tracking to look for instances of eyes wandering offscreen for a protracted period of time. The test environment software effectively "takes over your PC" during the test and I would imagine is pretty effective at detecting alternate/multiple display outputs etc.

There are probably scalability issues, but privacy is not an issue from the perspective of the proctor - you are effectively surrendering it by agreeing to take the test online, you could have gone to a test center instead.

I don't know what you mean by "home economics", but to me, that encompasses things like balancing a checkbook and making a budget and taxes and understanding how savings and debt and compound interest works how to choose when to save and when to go into debt. The sort of money matters that apply to any schmuck trying to live in the world. The reason so many people lack those skills is that for the most part we don't teach them in high school. Calculators have nothing to do with it.

Thank god we still teach quadratic equations, complex numbers, hyperbolic trig functions, and geometric constructions though. I don't know what would become of the world if most people didn't understand those things when we set them loose in the world.