New Exam Fees?

[Toast Viking]

Just received an email from the Faculty re: the new Examplify software they are introducing. All students are being asked to pay a $57.00 fee just to write their exams now. Wondering if anyone else is outraged by this? I sent an email to the Dean and Faculty, but asking 300+ students to pay $57 each for a new exam software they didn't even ask for seems pretty lucrative. Especially considering exams start in less than a month.

Isn't tuition expensive enough already? Jeez. Wondering what others think about this.

(Admin, feel free to delete if this kind of post isn't allowed for some reason)

[flertalgerdal1]

I am cool with it...but I am American where my tuition would be 3 times what I pay at uOttawa...

[bubbles]

15 minutes ago, hopeless semantic said:

Just received an email from the Faculty re: the new Examplify software they are introducing. All students are being asked to pay a $57.00 fee just to write their exams now. Wondering if anyone else is outraged by this? I sent an email to the Dean and Faculty, but asking 300+ students to pay $57 each for a new exam software they didn't even ask for seems pretty lucrative. Especially considering exams start in less than a month.

Isn't tuition expensive enough already? Jeez. Wondering what others think about this.

(Admin, feel free to delete if this kind of post isn't allowed for some reason)

Yeah, I felt blindsided. Why are we being told this less than a month before exams? This should have been addressed in September.

[Toast Viking]

36 minutes ago, bubbles said:

Yeah, I felt blindsided. Why are we being told this less than a month before exams? This should have been addressed in September.

I agree. It seems far too late in the semester to spring something like this on students. I know other schools (i.e Queens) pay for their students' exam software. Pretty unreasonable to compel students to pay for something like this with no advance notice IMO.

[Mignonette]

Not only that, but it changes the way the exam will happen.  I honestly do lean on Ctrl+F to get through my notes, or copy and paste an outline into the question to guide my response.  I have the relevant laws decisions open on a browser window instead of printing/downloading/buying copies.  These are strategies that profs and other students have encouraged over the course of my entire law school career. I have literally been encouraged to use these tools.  Now in my last year the process changes?

[Chewy]

4 hours ago, Mignonette said:

Not only that, but it changes the way the exam will happen.  I honestly do lean on Ctrl+F to get through my notes, or copy and paste an outline into the question to guide my response.  I have the relevant laws decisions open on a browser window instead of printing/downloading/buying copies.  These are strategies that profs and other students have encouraged over the course of my entire law school career. I have literally been encouraged to use these tools.  Now in my last year the process changes?

Hold up... this new software won't allow you to use ctrl+F to search through notes or copy and paste prewrites?

[Ob16]

On 11/15/2023 at 3:42 PM, Chewy said:

Hold up... this new software won't allow you to use ctrl+F to search through notes or copy and paste prewrites?

Yep, won’t work with the software. One of my profs explained that there is fully secured and half secured exams depending on the class. Fully secured will require us to print our notes out without any digital access. Half secured let’s us upload our notes but the doc is completely locked. Absolutely ridiculous.

[reaperlaw]

UO is just going back to how they always did computer exams. Before COVID this is how things worked, with no access to external documents, printed notes only, and no copying from outside the program. So as recently as Spring 2020...

Having to pay for the software is some BS, but the other stuff is how almost every lawyer who went to school in the computer exam era did their exams. It's fine. If anything, professors will lower their expectations now. When you can simply ctrl + f your notes, there isn't any excuse for not knowing the answer. 

If you think this sucks wait until you learn the bar exam doesn't let you electronically search notes either...

[Archaeolaw]

1 hour ago, reaperlaw said:

So as recently as Spring 2020...

 

1 hour ago, reaperlaw said:

the bar exam doesn't let you electronically search notes either

The system would be reasonable if we knew about it at the beginning of the semester. The law school allowed students to write their notes all semester in a way that is suitable for an exam that allows for ctrl+f, electronic notes, etc. and then announced this change very late. 

I imagine there are very few students who wrote in exams in the spring of 2020 who haven't graduated yet. The vast majority of us have never written exams in this format, which would be fine if we knew about the format in September (just like we know that the bar exam is the same deal well in advance of actually writing it). They sent us an email, which was lacking in detail to say the least, a couple weeks out from the end of the semester. I just can't see any reason to introduce it now instead of simply waiting for the beginning of the winter term. 

And yeah, paying for it is an absolute joke. 

[flertalgerdal1]

On 11/17/2023 at 11:58 PM, Ob16 said:

Yep, won’t work with the software. One of my profs explained that there is fully secured and half secured exams depending on the class. Fully secured will require us to print our notes out without any digital access. Half secured let’s us upload our notes but the doc is completely locked. Absolutely ridiculous.

You can control F with the half-secured option. You can do anything in your word doc notes, you just can't copy/paste from your notes to the exam software. I tested it with the practice exams. So, control F is allowed in half-secured.

On 11/15/2023 at 3:42 PM, Chewy said:

Hold up... this new software won't allow you to use ctrl+F to search through notes or copy and paste prewrites?

You can ctrl F in your word doc notes. It lets you split screen, and you can do whatever you always do in word. It won't let you copy paste though.

[Ob16]

5 hours ago, flertalgerdal1 said:

You can control F with the half-secured option. You can do anything in your word doc notes, you just can't copy/paste from your notes to the exam software. I tested it with the practice exams. So, control F is allowed in half-secured.

You can ctrl F in your word doc notes. It lets you split screen, and you can do whatever you always do in word. It won't let you copy paste though.

Wow, thanks! That’s great to hear, my prof must’ve explained it wrong, he chose the fully secured option. Hopefully the rest of them will be half-secured.

[flertalgerdal1]

7 hours ago, Ob16 said:

Wow, thanks! That’s great to hear, my prof must’ve explained it wrong, he chose the fully secured option. Hopefully the rest of them will be half-secured.

Sure thing, and good luck on exams!

[Mignonette]

 

On 11/19/2023 at 10:36 AM, reaperlaw said:

UO is just going back to how they always did computer exams. Before COVID this is how things worked, with no access to external documents, printed notes only, and no copying from outside the program. So as recently as Spring 2020...

Having to pay for the software is some BS, but the other stuff is how almost every lawyer who went to school in the computer exam era did their exams. It's fine. If anything, professors will lower their expectations now. When you can simply ctrl + f your notes, there isn't any excuse for not knowing the answer. 

If you think this sucks wait until you learn the bar exam doesn't let you electronically search notes either...

My issue is that the faculty said that they "carefully considered and tested this option for months".  So why did they give us 2 weeks notice? If they knew that we would not be able to use electronic notes and textbooks, why did they let us study that way for 3 months?  I used all etexbooks this semester and took my reading notes "in the margins" with electronic software.  Now I have two weeks to completely restructure this, as I won't be able to pull up my virtual textbook on LexisNexis.  If I had known that I would need paper copies, I would have typed up my notes in a word doc to be printed.  They could have just said, starting in January, we will require a new software, but they chose to push this through this year.