Lexis EXam Invigilation System

Over recent years, computers have been making their way into the classroom and lecture theatre. Overhead projectors, blackboards, and whiteboards have been joined or even displaced by smartboards and computer based multimedia presentations. Students with laptops are a common sight, and courses have their lecture notes on the web. Students are taking courses in programming, web-site design, computer graphics, and many other digital disciplines. Yet these courses are still being assessed with traditional pen and paper examinations. The reasons for this are several including inertia, worries about security, and a lack of available tools to administer high-security exams with con dence. At the request of the Academic Committee of the Imperial College Computing Department, we were asked to develop such a tool so that our students could sit an o cial examination using the Linux workstations in our teaching laboratories[?]. We embarked on a project to develop a system to provide necessary resources to candidates, prevent cheating, and securely retrieve and store the work done by the candidates during the exam. Here we describe the technologies, problems, and solutions encountered during the development of software to support exam invigilation. The result of this work is the Lexis EXam Invigilation System, which was used to administer a rst year programming exam on 21st March 2001 which comprised 110 students with access to 160 Linux workstations and lasted for three hours. At the end of which, the labs were restored to general access use. According to the BBC, on the 2nd of April 2001, students sat the rst paperless exam in the UK in a pilot scheme in Northern Ireland[?]. In fact, we beat them to it by several weeks.