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 …

I had to proctor an exam tonight.

If you’re not familiar with the idea, proctors are those people who walk around while you’re taking a test, making sure you don’t cheat.

Proctors are BORED OUT OF THEIR MINDS.

Yes, I’m supposed to be looking out for students cheating, and as far as they know, that’s what I’m doing. But actually, there’s no way I could make it through a 75-minute (or longer) test without some of these handy sanity-saving activities:

• Testing every combination on the lock to the computer cabinet. Except the right one.
• Trying to flip an eraser around its long axis. I can’t do it. I know I can’t do it, and I know why I can’t do it. But somehow, it still passes for interesting…

• Wondering why there is a balloon hanging from the roof

• Measuring the dimensions of the room in steps

• Making weird hand gestures to confuse people who don’t quite remember the right hand rule
• Calculating whether that irritating hum could be at the room’s resonant frequency
• Pretending I’m a Pong ball

• For the devoted: the Percolation Game. Credit goes to …