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CST 499 - Week 6

This week, our group made the last touches to CONVEE, our AAC application for our capstone project, and then we proceeded to record and publish the (first) draft of our video (if it's approved, it'll be the last draft). I'm very proud of the three of us and what we have accomplished a little over eight weeks. It's been rewarding to watch our application grow from the initial planning stages to what it is now. Abby plans to take over CONVEE after capstone and expand on it further, and I'm positive she'll do great things with it in the future. I might still help out with development and other related stuff once in a while.

I also took the ETS Computer Science Field Test, which was a very disappointing experience. First, the test is too wide in scope, and it is littered with questions about specific niche topics not always taught in classes. Second, setting up the testing application was slow and awkward, and I had to wait 30 minutes for the proctor to set everything up on their end before I could start. I don't believe these kinds of standardized tests are a good indicator of students' knowledge, which is why universities and colleges have started to phase out the SAT/ACT as part of admissions requirements and how masters programs are placing less emphasis on GRE scores.

Lastly, and by far the worst and most concerning about the process, is ProctorU's data policies and practices during test tasking. They made me install questionable third party browser plugins, a "lockdown" browser, and had remote control over my system while I was testing - they could've accessed files or information or modified other things on my computer without me knowing at all. Also, ProctorU never gave any indications of what user permissions on their end were required, and ran a third party script that disabled a number of background processes on my Windows computer which I didn't notice until after I rebooted my computer after finishing the test, as exiting the "lockdown" browser crashed my computer.

I believe ProctorU either needs to seriously revise its process of preparing test takers' systems before testing, or use programs that are less invasive without any security concerns.

I'm looking forward to presenting our project at the capstone festival. I hope people will find it interesting and appreciate the hard work we put into it.

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