Computers have made their way into the classroom and lecture hall.
Overhead projectors, blackboards, and whiteboards are being
displaced by smartboards and computer based multimedia
presentations. Students with laptops are a common sight and many
courses have their lecture notes on the web. Students are studying
programming, web-site design, computer graphics, and many other
practical disciplines, yet these courses are still being assessed
with traditional pen and paper examinations.
When the Computing Department of Imperial College decided that their
programming courses would be assessed with a computer-based paperless
exam using our standard Linux[
8] workstations, we were asked
to make the labs secure enough to take an official exam. Here we
present the issues and technologies involved in securing Linux for
this purpose, and the software we developed to administer our
examinations.
