Comment Re:More money = better grade at the end? (Score 1) 321
My law school has been using a program called Examsoft for four years or so. Examsoft locks out your hard drive and limits you to a simple word processing program which saves your answers at the end of the exam period. The idea is that you should not be able to wholesale cut and paste answers from pre-written documents.
You have a choice between using a laptop or writing in bluebooks. Purely a matter of personal preference.
Our registrar told me that when they started using the laptops, there was very little change in the class rankings that was attributable to the use of computers v. bluebooks. How she can determine that, I'm not sure, but that was her opinion.
The point is, at least in this context, the ability to use a laptop is not discriminatory. If you want to use one, you can. If not, no problem. If you are not used to taking notes/writing papers on the smaller keyboard, you are probably better off writing by hand anyway. In fact, last semester, the "new and improved" version of Examsoft caused about 80% of the laptop users in my exam room to lock up midstream, anywhere from 10 minutes to 2.5 hours in to a 3 hour exam. Law students being complete stress monkeys, we all blew a gasket. The professor ended up having to offer a special grading scale because of the problems with the program, as there was an obvious difference in the grades of those who handwrote the whole thing v. those who (tried) to laptop.
The moral of the story? It's just a tool. And you may be better off without it, depending on whose software you are forced to rely on.
You have a choice between using a laptop or writing in bluebooks. Purely a matter of personal preference.
Our registrar told me that when they started using the laptops, there was very little change in the class rankings that was attributable to the use of computers v. bluebooks. How she can determine that, I'm not sure, but that was her opinion.
The point is, at least in this context, the ability to use a laptop is not discriminatory. If you want to use one, you can. If not, no problem. If you are not used to taking notes/writing papers on the smaller keyboard, you are probably better off writing by hand anyway. In fact, last semester, the "new and improved" version of Examsoft caused about 80% of the laptop users in my exam room to lock up midstream, anywhere from 10 minutes to 2.5 hours in to a 3 hour exam. Law students being complete stress monkeys, we all blew a gasket. The professor ended up having to offer a special grading scale because of the problems with the program, as there was an obvious difference in the grades of those who handwrote the whole thing v. those who (tried) to laptop.
The moral of the story? It's just a tool. And you may be better off without it, depending on whose software you are forced to rely on.
