Monday, February 9, 2009

Beating Lockdown Browser?

Am I beating the system?  I managed to activate blogger from within Respondus Lockdown browser.

5 comments:

Rodger said...

No, although I devised several methods that seemed to beat Respondus lockdown browser, they were all rendered moot because you can't exit whatever exam you are taking to employ my devious methods.

Anonymous said...

Not that I'm advocating cheating, but if you wanna beat the stupes who think lockdown is gonna stop you, because inevitably any smart mouse figures out the trap, here you go:

Take your exam on one computer, and have another laptop sitting right next to you connected to wi-fi. Voila, lockdown is foiled.

Rodger said...

Good point, Anonymous! I should have mentioned that I was looking at the Lockdown only in the context of a proctored environment, i.e., a test taken in our computer lab. An online test taken in an unsupervised environment (not that uncommon in online education, of course) should always be considered an "open book" test. The questions should be carefully crafted so that the answer cannot be directly googled or quoted from a text; instead, faculty should look for a synthesis from various sources that demonstrates a true understanding of the topic rather than a simple answer. Understandably, students tend to hate that kind of question, but if it shows real world application of the knowledge, that's not a bad thing.

Pepper Culpepper said...

I have a brilliant idea. Why not get yourself a cheap tablet and use that for an external reference?

Rodger said...

A tablet would do the trick. Given the preponderance of Internet devices (other computers, iPads, and most phones) I don't think Lockdown Browser does much of anything during an off-campus exam except make it more difficult to save or print the exam to give to others (more difficult, but of course not impossible).