Everyone of us has heard of Science Fiction. We all have read and have been fascinated by some of the thought provoking science fiction writings. This is my first blog and i too want to devote it to fiction; not science fiction but ‘Exam Fiction’!
During the course of my recently concluded semester final exams, i constantly wondered what a wonderful scenario it would be for all of us examinees, if the schools and universities adopt an Open Source ideology in conducting the examinations! Presently, the examination system is much more like the proprietary software market where the end user (the student) gets only the final product (dreaded question paper) without getting the source code (the text book, from where s/he can get most of the solutions too!). Just like most of the products of the closed source world, the intellect behind the question paper is not original, and is often just a copy-paste from some other source. The community support (hope you understand the analogy in the examination context by now!) in this system is also very limited and is very very restricted! There is another big problem. If the end user intends to get the product before its scheduled launch date (the date of the exam), s/he has to rely on pirating the product through numerous modes of cracking available (all of us have experienced taking leaked papers at some point of time, isn’t it?). Thus, all the complications of the proprietary software market are directly inherited by our current examination system.
Now let’s consider the conduction of exams in the manner which i love – the Open Source way! For convenience, i consider the product (the exam paper of course!) released only under the GPL. In such a system, the end user (the student) would get the source code (text book) bundled with the final product (question paper)! More significantly, the student would get the freedoms entrusted upon the Open Source products – the freedom to modify the product according to his/her needs and then redistribute it! Imagine what an impact such a system would make! We would have the liberty of modifying the questions of the paper according to our level of preparation and interest! What more, we can even redistribute the modified paper to our friends for their use and of course, they can then modify it as per their needs! Even then, there will be no lack of community support for anyone taking the examination. This system will revolutionize the examination system for the examinees just like the Open Source philosophy has done to the software world.
So all you examinees, come on and propagate this idea. I can gurantee, taking exams in such a system will be real fun!
