Wanted: An Open Source Electric Blue Book
In an earlier post I suggested a low cost way of making it possible for students to take exams on computers. An alternative suggested in the comments was to have students boot their laptops under a stripped down version of Linux configured to make it impossible for the student to access anything on his computer other than the exam taking software. That would provide a very low cost alternative to the commercial software now used for the purpose.
This looks like an obvious idea for an open source project. I am happy to contribute the name: Electric Blue Book. If anyone is interested, I can probably dig up my old notes on how a test taking program might be designed to make things easier for both the students taking the test and the teacher grading it. I have no experience with the sort of programming that would be involved, however, so somebody else would have to take charge of the project.
Ideally, it would make it possible to put the OS and the program on either a flash disk or a CD. A laptop booted off of it would provide access only to the test taking program. The file representing the test would be saved to the flash disk, if there was one, or to the hard disk of the computer in some easily identifiable form, to be transferred to the teacher's computer when the exam ended. Ideally there would be versions for Mac, Windows and Linux.
Volunteers?