Funnily enough my fluff post on exam proctoring got a good response on Facebook. I guess I should write more fluff. But for now, more on exam proctoring.

A few years ago I was bored while proctoring some exam — what a surprise — and my mind drifted to thinking about the exam clock. Or the lack of one, really. Our exam rooms don’t have a clock positioned where the students can see it, but they need to know how much time is left in the test, so we would usually put up the official NIST/USNO time page on a projector.

The problem is, this page is full of “junk.” It has a world map with day and night regions indicated, the date, assorted buttons and explanatory text, and in general all sorts of features that are not the one thing a test-taking student wants to know: how much time is left?

In those days I had the luxury of being bored even after the exam was over, so I whipped up a small web app to display a countdown to the end of the exam. And nothing else.

It was an instant success, in the sense that it was …