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I'm note sure who you think is trying to score points, but I am certainly not. Troposurfer used a rather curious form of address which I felt warranted a similar response.
Your comment that "...the common saying of it takes months, is understood and should not be blown out of proportion..."ignores the unhelpful effect that such exaggerations will have on the CAA.
Many of those posting comments in this forum do so in the hope that the CAA will see them and take action. It is certainly true that some CAA staff read pprune. But if they see complaints about "months awaiting exam results" they will simply dismiss them out of hand on the basis that it is "just students being unreasonable again". The comment "the CAA think their own exams are crap" is also likely to have a less than constructive effect. The message here is that if you want your comments to be taken seriously then you must make serious comments.
FFF
The concern about getting an increased number of appeals with a computer based system originated from a CAA examiner, and he was probably correct.
At the moment the xams occur monthy with something in the region of 150 students participating. If we take for example the POF exam it currently holds about 45 questions. So the CAA produce a single paper of 45 questions per month. They examine this paper to try to detect and eliminate problem questions. The number of appeals raised by students and schools varies from month to month, but for a single subject it is pobably about 5 to 10 per month.
Before marking the papers the examiners consider each of these appeals and decide which to accept. Where an appeal is accepted they give all of the students the marks for that question and remove the question from the question bank. In slow time they then go back to the JAA Subject Expert Team and decide what to do about the problem question. In most months not more than 1 or two questions in any given subject are accepted as being defective.
From the CAA point of view this process represents a big work load, but at least it all occurs within a single week. They then have the rest of the month to get on with other tasks such as carrying out annual inspections of the schools.
Now consider the situation with computer based exams on demand. In order to prevent cheating it will be necessary to ensure that no two (or at least very few) exams are identical. This will require either the creation of a large number of stock exam papers or randomly generated papers for each student. The random generation of papers is obviously no problem for the computers, but will inevitably involve the use of a much bigger number of questions in each month.
This bigger number of questions will inevitably attract more appeals. And these appeals will arise on a daily basis instead of being concentrated in a single week. Worse still, if the results are to be published immediately, the appeals must be considered immediately. OK they could issue conditional results, but there would still be a need to process appeals in a very short time. From the CAA examiners' point of view this scenario is nightmare city.
All of these problems could of course be avoided if only the CAA could sort out their question banks. Sadly the fact is that many of the recently created questions are no better than earlier ones. So more problems are being stored up every time the question bank is expanded. For an example of this problem just look at the "variations of Vx and Vy with altitude changes" questions in the PERF exam. These questions were withdrawn early in 2001 but they still keep resufacing without any sign of improvement.
I would love to see the introduction of computer exams on demand, but there is no point in raising unrealistic expectations. They will certainly be brought in within the next century. They will probably be brought in with the next decade. But within the next year?........I very much doubt it.