Ryan Morlok’s Blog

I thought I’d mention a funny story related to this semester’s final. For those of you who aren’t CS 105 TAs (which probably means you don’t care anyway), we use a Word document that defines a bunch of styles that have various meanings in the exam. There are the obvious ones that format code to a mono-spaced font and such, but there are also less intuitive ones that define an option (it’s a multiple choice test) for a question, as well as the correct answer. In semesters before my time, a TA had written a system in VBA to take this style information and generate the different forms of the exam (we have 4 forms for each exam, involving scambling the order of the questions as well as the order of the answers, to make cheating more difficult). This entire system is rather broken at this point, but the Word styles still remain.In the Word document the correct answer to every question appears as blue. If this is not changed prior the final print, the correct answers can be seen by looking for the answer that is not as crisp as the others (I refer to this as the Li-Lun method, for the TA who figured this out. It’s rather subtle, as the blue only elicits a slight gray-scale effect). Exams have gone to print with this problem before, but this was not the case this exam. As Marsha (the Professor) was preparing the exams for the printer this time, she did some sort of replace all to get rid of the blue (not exactly sure what happened). In any case, it messed up the formatting on quite a few questions, but to make matters worse, the problems wouldn’t affect all of the solution options of the questions. They would only start affecting the correct answer to the question, and every subsequent option in that question. As such, after a question or two, students would pick up on this and get the answers to these questions for free.

We first realized the problem when we gave the final early to a few students as part of a conflict exam. As the problem was discovered, Marsha sent out a panic email to the TA list. It was followed an hour or two later, with assurances that the problem had been resolved — we would be reprinting the exams. I was rather impressed that she had gotten testing services to do a reprint in that short of time. We needed the forms in about 19 hours, and very few of them were business hours (this was about 4 p.m.).

About 4 hours later, another panic email hits the TA list. Marsha had thought that there was another day before the final was to be given. It was 8 p.m., and she indicated that we would have to print things ourselves. Now, to understand the magnitude of that proposal, you have to understand the scale of the CS 105 final. We’re talking 850 students, with each exam being about 42 pages. That’s on the order of 35,000 pages to print, taking up about 17,000 sheets of paper (things are printed front-and-back). At that point I said I’d come in to campus, and we’d figure something out.

As I guessed, when we timed the printer, it took about 2:20 to print one copy of the exam (with staple). That’s about 34 hours to print the whole thing. Bear in mind that we needed the exam in about 12 hours at this point (it was pushing 10 o’clock). It might have technically been possible. We had 4 such printers at our disposal, so if we didn’t run out of paper, toner, or staples in them, we might have had a chance. I personally didn’t want to stay up all night to keep feeding the printer paper, so I managed to convice Marsha that we should just drop the affected questions, and go with the original version.

We typed up and printed out the errata. Normally we just post it on the overhead at the exam locations, but with this many questions being affected, I didn’t want to make it difficult for people to look over it carefully. Especially those in Foellinger (a large auditorium, where about 400 students are given the exam), where it is hard to see the overhead from the back of the room.

Everything ended up going well for the exam, but it was quite an ordeal to actually get to the point of administering the test.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 14th, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.