<p>The only thing we know is that the test had to be submitted by 7 pm and student started the exam at 6 pm. She had a week to get the exam done. One of the reasons for the glitch is that she let someone else log on to the exam from her computer. Ok, she did not know, however if she had not waited until the last minute she would have found out that this was the problem and could have found a solution. It is poor planning if she did not build in a contingency or and waited until the final hour to submit the exam. Things happen (sort of like the presidential candidate who felt he did not need a concession speech and scrambled at the last minute because of a “glitch”. Poor planning and no contingencies).</p>
<p>What about people who showed up to vote in FL? They were allowed to vote as long as they showed up before the cut off time. The fact that the facility and computer couldn’t accomendate that many people didn’t preclude them from voting. Those people had busy schedule and they just managed to get to the voting booth after they were finished with what they had to do during the day. What if they were turned away because of their poor time management?</p>
<p>I don’t think it is for us to judge if OP’s D had justifiable reason to wait until last minute to take the test. What’s important is that she took the test within the time frame that was given to her. As stated by mathmom, what if she took the test at 1pm and IT weren’t able fix the bug before 7pm?</p>
<p>IT also knew they have been having issues with the program. Did they tell the professor? I am in IT. If I know there is a known bug, I let my users know about it.</p>
<p>Actually, the NYC Specialized High Schools were exempted from many regulations which existed for the rest of the NYC public school system. </p>
<p>Considering the decrepit state of the latter in the '80s and early '90s* as illustrated through violent crime rates and mediocre academic stats…I understand most parents of SHS students considered those exemptions…such as not being barred from immediately kicking out students for violent behavior/conduct to be a good thing. </p>
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<li>Got a taste of it in middle school and from seeing older neighborhood kids pleading with me and other friends to avoid attending our neighborhood high school at all costs after experiencing extreme violence…including getting knifed to the point of requiring multiple stitches which were clearly visible.<br></li>
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<p>Moreover, it seems one of the candidates experienced similar IT issues as his campaign’s GOTV database crashed and was offline for 90 minutes during election day.</p>
<p>I am taking an online college class for work at the moment, and all of our assignments and exams are due by Monday at 9. It becomes available the Monday prior, so we have a full week to take them. It is written into the syllabus that if you start the assignment and have computer trouble FRIDAY OR EARLIER, you have to email IT ccing the professor, make every attempt to finish the exam on time even if it means going to the library and using a different computer, and if it still doesn’t work out you can be eligible for an extension. If it’s AFTER Friday, you’re screwed. The professor does understand that technology isn’t perfect and that’s why we have a week to take the test. If this professor has this sort of a policy it’s a shame he didnt outline it in the syllabus.</p>
<p>When I was in college I studied up until the last minute for each test so I could be as prepared as possible. If I had been hit by a car on the way to a test because I had just finished studying and was rushing to get in my seat on time, no professor would have penalized me for waiting until the last minute. I think this is an analogous situation. The girl started the test with enough time to finish. She shouldn’t be penalized. Give some people a little power and they are sure to misuse it. Perhaps next time the prof should warn his students that the online testing system’s weaknesses makes deadlines meaningless, and they should actually do each quiz a full day in advance.</p>
<p>Actually, I don’t think the two are analogous. I think a better one would be if you ran late to study and then your car wouldn’t start, I’m not sure the prof would excuse you. </p>
<p>If the OP’s D got hit by a car, I’m sure she’d get a medical waiver.</p>
<p>If your car wouldn’t start then it would be your fault because it is YOUR car. In this case, the computer system was designated by the professor, the student didn’t pick it. If it didn’t work, students didn’t have anything to do with it.</p>
<p>If the professor said you had to take this particular bus to get to the test center and the bus broke down or it’s late, how could it be the student’s fault.</p>
<p>In your dreams (or maybe this was the case the last time you worked for the NYC DOE). As a person who has both attended and worked in a specialized high schools and still works for the DOE (even at stuy and with some of their former administrators), they are not exempt and they fall under the same Chancellors, city and state regulations as any other NYC public school. </p>
<p>While Stuyvesant may not act on and most likely do not reporting on many situations as they become part of the school report card (especially suspension issues), as they may think that they are above it all (and for their sake lucky they have not been caught or that nothing so egregious happened that a parent or administrator escalated the situation to a network leader, manhattan superintendent of high schools, the chancellor or the state) they are not exempt from them.</p>
<p>Two of my kids took an online class -two different classes- in each case they had a glitch which might affect a grade. As with the OP it was a computer glitch that caused the problem.</p>
<p>Each DD was told no exceptions. Understanding that there are so many students with so many excuses all the time, the DDs asked the profs if they would keep an open mind and IF that test made the difference in grade would the prof give them the benefit of the doubt (being an organized A student vs a slacker making excuses)</p>
<p>In each case my DD got an A in the class, I think one prof gave 50% credit or something like that. Online classes are difficult, one assumes access during the entire time available and it can be server issues or personal issues like power outages, internet outages etc. Reasonable excuses, but also part of adjusting to an online format.</p>
<p>I would ask for something like that. She should have every right to complete the test in the time allowed by the prof free from server error, it was not waiting until the last minute irresponsibly, it was doing it during the window provided. Students have lives & jobs & other classes, that may have been the best time for her to complete the quiz. The server should have been up.</p>
<p>But the profs hear so many lame excuses, they cannot just be granting exceptions left and right, asking for the benefit of the doubt if that test grade would have mattered seems reasonable. Your DD can then prove her diligence the rest of the term and prove she is worth a bit of extra time spent by the professor to address it at the end.</p>
<p>Oldfort, as an IT person, would your department be at fault in this situation, if you designed the system so that multiple students could not take the test from the same computer?</p>
<p>I know that the grading program that we use in school, sends you an e-mail if you log in from a computer other than the one you actually registered your account on. Sometimes I will be in another office and will have to look up information on a student. By the time I get back to my office, I have an e-mail asking for confirmation that I did log in from a different computer. It will ask me to send a response if I did not do this. </p>
<p>I know my on line banking kicks in another security measure if I log in from a computer other than my home computer (I did ask that the system do this).</p>
<p>During the past 2 weeks my son had a project due and power was still going off and on. I advised him to do it as soon as possible in case power went off again. I didn’t even think of him being able to complain that he didn’t finish in the time provided because of a power outage. Professor gave a week to take a quiz. Don’t wait until the last minute.</p>
<p>We do not allow sessions on our company email account. If someone tries to log on multiple times, he/she would not be able to and there would be an error message to state as such.</p>
<p>If the intention was multiple people couldn’t log on from the same computer, and the system allowed it then kicked someone off half an hour later, it is a bug. I would have informed the professor so she could let the students know. It does appear that the SAs did know about it.</p>
<p>But if the student waited until the last minute to do this, how could you (the IT department) fix it for the student in enough time so that the student makes the deadline? So now it seems like it is the IT department’s fault that the student did not got kicked out of a system that it was designed to do and the student has no ownership, responsibility or accountability for her part in the situation.</p>
<p>Is there a policy in the class regarding the taking of on-line tests? Perhaps the professor should update the class on the policy and multiple people logging in to the same computer (other than library or computer center computers).</p>
<p>There are some people that believe all college lessons are learned in the classroom. I am not one of those. I think college students, especially those that live on campus, learn a balance between class, study time, friend time, booze, sleep time, roommate troubles, and many more things. I believe lessons learned in these and other areas can help a student later in life when they are self-supporting adults. Those off campus in rented housing also learn a bit about home problems, dealing with rental agents, and landlords. All good lessons imo.</p>
<p>This prof is teaching more than just the material in a textbook. The student in question had a week to take a quiz but waited until the last hour of the last day to start it. While the student may have been unaware there was a problem known to IT, the student must have known that sometimes computer problems exist. Anybody with much computer experience knows this. The lessons here are not just the material covered on the quiz. Potential problems with time management, priorities, computer glitches, strict professors, are now clearer to this kid. I understand the student’s (unspoken) plan was to push this back to the very last minute, then cross fingers and hope everything went perfectly. Sometimes that works! This time it didn’t. Now student knows that isn’t the best plan. The only price student will probably have to pay is getting a B on a quiz. We often learn more in life from our troubles than our successes. This was a cheap lesson to learn; later in life consequences might have been more serious.
Romani is so right, in post 31.</p>
<p>As for post 28 “someone who takes responsibility…”. It may be the student is typically a hard worker. It may be student is typically early submitting assignments. But that isn’t the case this time. The student took a chance waiting until the last minute, and it didn’t work. Taking responsibility would be accepting the consequences. Trying to seek favors and extensions is not.</p>
<p>Actually, that was taken from my experiences attending a NYC public middle school in the late '80s where it seemed the NYC Board of Ed policies cowed teachers so much into catering to the violently disruptive kids and giving them exemption after exemption from consequences that IMO should have gotten them suspended or if in the greater public…cause them to incur legal sanctions…including possible jail time. Instead, they were allowed to run wild and violent while the rest of us suffered and the teachers did nothing/tried to blame the victims. </p>
<p>Conditions were worse at my neighborhood zoned high school where knifings were endemic. </p>
<p>Incidentally, it seems this idiotic mentality of catering to violently disruptive kids continues into the present with some public school districts in other parts of the country. </p>
<p>Just a year or so ago, one client’s granddaughter in an upper-middle class midwest suburb had to deal with a stalker whom the idiotic school admins/board kept trying to defend/get back into the local high school despite the fact he was convicted of a violent felony/stalking and two judges in succession ruled he was too violent to be allowed back into the general school population. </p>
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<p>As another IT person, why is the above considered a bad thing? IME, not allowing multiple users in that context would be considered a positive security feature…especially if you want to avoid possibility of cheating/security breaches. </p>
<p>Moreover, the above isn’t necessary to avoid this very problem. All they would need to implement is a timeout feature which automatically logs out the prior user and thus, allow for the next user to log-in without issues. </p>
<p>Think about it. Do you really want to enable multiple students to login and take tests from the same computer considering the serious implications in the context of cheating and network security??</p>
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<p>Most of the online class policies I’ve seen from Prof/TA and younger friends’ syllabi tended to be of the type that if one was given a large block of time like a week and the student waited until the last day to start it and problems of IT or other types show up…the onus was on the student and Profs/TAs aren’t inclined to give an extension.</p>
<p>With this additional information, I’d like to change my previously expressed opinion. This was not a system glitch, it was bad judgment. There’s no way I would expect the prof to be flexible in this circumstance.</p>
<p>I have classes that have some online quizzes with long lead times. I tell my students that if they wait until the last minute and they have problems, that’s too bad. The OP’s D took her chances and lost in this case. That’s what happens when you take your chances.</p>
<p>I should note that when there is a system-wide problem, then I add extra time, but not when it’s just an individual.</p>