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situation where they may be stressed and nervous.
Certainly, when using the technical resources of
the students, loan devices are offered in case of
technical problems or for those students who do not
own a mobile device.
Nevertheless, despite the obvious advantages
there is one major pitfall with using student’s
devices, namely that students have access to their
local files, to the internet and therefore also to
communication tools. Thus, we developed the
“Secure Exam Environment” (SEE).
3 THE SECURE EXAM
ENVIRONMENT (SEE)
Without a doubt, online applications and exams both
come with massive security issues (see Weippl 2005,
Bartram and Hambleton 2008, and Scheuermann and
Björnsson 2009, pp. 84). However, the secure exam
environment can hinder the issue of cheating.
3.1 Security
Since KNOPPIX is said to be the Linux-distribution
with the broadest hardware support, a knoppix boot
system (www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html)
was developed to meet the requirement that there
would be no access to students’ own files and data
as well as to Internet addresses and links. The
students boot the SEE from a flash drive or a DVD.
Corresponding firewall rules restrict the access to
external (online) resources. The only internet
resource that can be accessed from the SEE is the
server of the e-learning-platform Moodle
(http://moodle.com). As Moodle also provides
chatting capabilities and (in most cases) course
related material, we integrated the Safe Exam
Browser (SEB – see www.safeexambrowser.org/
news_en.html for details), an open source project
supported by the University Giessen and the ETH
Zurich, into Moodle-core 1.9.4. The SEB restricts
the access to the exam page only. Since the SEB is
only available for Windows XP, Windows 7 and
MAC OS X, we have to run a minimized
WindowsXP that provides exactly the necessary
programs in a virtual machine (www.virtualbox.org)
on the KNOPPIX system (see Fig. 1 for a sketch of
the system). (see Frankl, Scharter and Zebedin
2011a and b).
After booting from USB or DVD, KNOPPIX
automatically starts the WindowsXP-Virtual
Machine,
then Windows XP automatically starts the
Figure 1: The operating principle of SEE (see Frankl,
Schartner and Zebedin 2011a).
SEB that automatically connects to the homepage of
Moodle. The students login into Moodle and select
the appropriate course and access the exam.
In order to make it work, the respective browser
security settings have to be chosen when setting up
the Moodle test. To guarantee that only students who
are present in person can access the online-exam, the
network address of the lecture hall has to be entered
in the designated field in the quiz security settings.
3.2 Safety and Privacy
Electronic exam environments massively depend on
the availability of (information) technology. During
an online exam our system relies on the online
connection between the SEB and the Moodle Server.
In order to provide the maximum availability of
the network connection we only use cat5-wired LAN
at this time. However, LAN also doesn’t guarantee a
100 % stable connection.
Hardware failures of laptops are not such a
problem, since students can continue the exam on one
of our loan-devices.
The answers provided by the students and the
grades achieved relate specifically to individual
students and hence according to the Austrian Data
protection act (see Republic of Austria 2009) their
privacy has to be protected. We use encrypted and
authenticated transmission lines between the SEB
and the Moodle server (HTTPS), and the Moodle
server uses login/password-authentication for the
students and the lecturers and grants access to
authorized persons only. Hence, we can guarantee the
privacy of exam data (see Frankl, Scharter and
Zebedin 2011a and b)
3.3 Organisational Aspects
During our first testruns we encountered network
timeout errors. After debugging we discovered a
misconfiguration in the DHCP settings assigned to
the lecture hall used for exams. The DHCP lifetime
was set to 120 minutes, which led to network
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