Experience with 'Secure' Exam Testing Software?

Durindana writes "My law school has decided using the Exam4 software from Extegrity, thinking it would be a good idea. I disagree; the software can only be used by students on their own laptops, and (of course) Exam4 is mono-platform. Anyone have experience using this software (e.g. security level, reliability) or, hopefully, successfully opposing its use? It strikes me as a hell of a disadvantage to students who'd like an alternative to hand-writing but - for some strange reason - don't own a Windows laptop."

dis/advantage

[forevermore]

My wife is applying to law school this year, and we've run into the same questions. Do we get her a powerbook now, and hope that her preferred school (U. Washington) continues to not use the software, or do we wait until school is about to start before we decide? Granted, we're now waiting because she got a new desktop machine and I can't afford to get her a laptop, but the question is still out there.

On the "disadvantage" side of things, exam4 looks particularly bad. Other pages allow students access to some of their notes (thus, making it advantageous to have a laptop) but no find/search functionality (or some other kind of feature-disabled option). Thus, you can get at the notes in digital form, all of them, but have to put up with a few restrictions. If all you get is a word processor (read: text editor, since it doesn't really do any extra word-processing things), there's not much advantage for the students. Of course, the professors will have the advantage of not having to read handwritten tests, etc.

Most law schools that use software like this also seem to consider it OPTIONAL. If your school is basically forcing you to buy/use a Windows-based laptop, they'd better be a top-tier school worth the extra $1500+...

My experiences

[David Price]

I've also encountered Extegrity's product, which is required at my law school. It does have at least rudimentary protection against the most obvious workarounds - when I tried to run it within VMWare, it "failed security check" and refused to operate. I'm not sure how exactly it checks to see if it's running in a virtualized environment - one project I have on my back-burner is to see how well it deals with bochs [sourceforge.net].

I'm also the proud owner of a PowerBook. My solution was to trade some other computer gear for a big old PC laptop with a mostly-dead battery that meets the system requirements. I plan to use that laptop only for taking exams. Aside from exams, my school is fairly platform-agnostic: papers are turned in on paper, and the only electronic interaction with professors is via email. The one kink that I have run into is profs and fellow students who insist on sharing their academic insight via Word .doc files. OpenOffice hasn't failed me yet, though, and of course Word for the Mac exists and is frequently available at a steep discount to students.