It's exam time folks! And thankfully we need not deal with the online objective test. It's a real shock to many of us that online tests have been done away with, after people managed to master the nuances of the tests. Online test at our college is much like a late-semester ritual, with every student and staff participating unwillingly. It's actually surprising that it took 2 yrs to find that students find it difficult to score from the tests. I am happy that the test is gone, but not for the right reasons.
In the last two years, I remember taking a few subjective tests (read written tests) which had quality questions which were both intersting and demanding yet definitely solvable. But I've been unfortunate, not to have attended one good online test. Bad questions make bad tests, in general. Come online tests, the poor options also add to your woe. But is anything worse than a question with two options being the same(Now you that's an offer you can decline)? Yes. The same question repeated twice (yes, back to back) with every word and every option intact, except for the question number. But the worst part about this is that, invariably you don't know the answer to the couple. (You can very well add this to our breathtaking Math discovery of the year- The Wretched Double Whammy Probability Distribution. It's discrete, but the agony continues !!).
There is a group which milks online test to the maximum - the daredevil hackers. But there's nothing great about this 'hacking'. You don't even have to guess a password or type a query. Any rookie can break into the database (read 'be lead into') by XAMPP's interface if the administrator is so callous that he does not even set the password to 'password'.And he fails to do it every time when the revamp the entire lab, which seems to be done at every semester break.But I wonder why girls do not open the databases, given their notorious ability to collaborate or carry paper scraps even during written tests (No Big Deal,huh). I just assume that the ladies do not do it, because our own man was spotted texting answers last sem to you know who. Plagiarism rules! And it does not end here.
Some questions are so exotic, that you doubt if you've wrongly entered the subject code in the startup screen. I panicked in the 5th sem, when my screen was replete with Software Eng. questions when I was supposed to do to some other 'entity' what we did to algos. It was more like a SE test and I still wonder which foreign prof was so dim-witted to post SE questions as some thing else in his course website.
They can't and they won't make corrections to wrong questions or answers- I again wonder why. It just means changing your db and restarting the db server if needed. We never get to see the Where You Went Wrong page. In a once in a blue moon opportunity, I got to see that elusive page and found that two questions were marked with wrong answers. When I picked up the courage to report this discrepancy, I was laughed off and was told that Where You Went Wrong was a myth- it simply did not exist! UNO - Unidentified Native Objec, this one!
