Group of students all login as the same user, how to preserve what they save?

[HendersonD]

Unusual situation that is unique to education. We have nearly every machine that a student were to touch (labs, libraries, and rolling laptop carts) using VMWare View. Students login as themselves and save documents all the time. During state exams we have all of our special education students login as ExamUser so they do not have access to previous files they have saved and internet access is disabled. Students type answers in MS Word or Wordpad and at the end of the exam print to a printer and logoff.

The issue becomes, what happens in the middle of an exam when a student accidently logs off the computer or the computer has some type of difficulty. Our desktops are set to refresh on logoff so even if they have saved their document to the desktop during the exam, it is lost. The only solution I can think of is issue flash drives and during the exam have users save their documents to the flash drive.

Any other way you can think of to preserver their work in case they log off before printing their test?

[Linjo]

Why not set up a folder redirection to a Windows-share and have Word/Wordpad to autosave every minute or so to that folder.

It should be easy enough to have a script to wipe them all after a successful exam.

// Linjo

[HendersonD]

The difficulty with this approach is students have access to each others work. Student A logs in as ExamUser, opens Word and saves the document to the desktop calling it MyTest. Student B logs in as ExamUser, fires up Word and saves a document to the desktop called BigTest. Both students will now see both documents on the desktop. There is no way to prevent Student B from opening up Student A's document

[HendersonD]

The difficulty with this approach is students have access to each others work. Student A logs in as ExamUser, opens Word and saves the document to the desktop calling it MyTest. Student B logs in as ExamUser, fires up Word and saves a document to the desktop called BigTest. The desktop is redirected to a file share. Both students will now see both documents on the desktop. There is no way to prevent Student B from opening up Student A's document

[vcpguy]

With folder redirection you can set Files and folders permission. Only those users who have creator/owner can access those files.

[Sami_K]

How many students are taking the exams simultaneously? just thinking some options..

- create separate VDI pool for exams and make those persistant desktops, just to provide the failsafe for these problems mentioned. Refresh the desktops after the exam.

- create separate ExamUser1..40 accounts, so they have own homedirs where to save files. Clean homedirs after the exam. (and if you don't actually want the exams returned as paper, you can setup a network folder with Write rights only, so they could save their answers but can't see each others files.)

[HendersonD]

Sami_k,

Your second suggestion might work, the biggest piece here is logistics getting unique usernames and passwords to the right adults who will be administering these exams. We have about 50-60 students at once sitting for these exams and they are scattered all over the building. The first approach will preserve there work but the timing piece is tough. Student starts the exam, answers several questions on the computer and saves his work to the desktop. The computer has some type of difficulty and the student is logged off. The student logs on to the computer again (same computer, different computer, does not matter) and the do not see their work. It has been saved as part of one persistent desktop but someone from my staff needs to find which desktop, retrieve the work, and get it to the student very quickly since these are timed exams.

vcpguy,

The folder redirection with a single user will not work. Yes I can set file/folder permissions on a share but if 50 students all login as ExamUser, every one of them will have the proper permission on this share to save work so they will all have the ability to see other students work along with their own.

I am leaning towards making separate logins (examuser1, examuser2, etc) with folder redirection or just using usb flash drives to save to

[vcpguy]

oh yes !!! it needs to have unique user. without that folder redirection will be point less