Digital White Board 2
Why was the original discussion locked? Do you not care about what we have to say?
This is a bad decision. My connection at my testing center is slow enough as it is. Now I have to use an additional tool that is slow and lacks flexibility? In the middle of a pandemic? Why are you making an already difficult situation more difficult?
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Richard Balkins, I think you are missing the point. Most lefties, have never even had a mouse in our left hands. It feels completely foreign to use since we have been trained on our right hand. At the same time, it feels completely foreign to have to draw or write out calculations using a mouse in our right hand. It requires much more skill than just clicking and dragging. I don't see why anyone should need to develop these skills when we could simply have A PIECE OF PAPER or a physical white board that can be erased. Why are they trying to make things more difficult than necessary!? That is the whole point.
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Richard Balkins - I agree with Barbara's comment above. It's not about switching a mouse to the other hand. We already learned to mouse right handed. But drawing / writing is a more dexterous skill that we would have to train with the mouse, on our non dominant hand, or switch hands, and now learn to mouse with the left hand, so it's easier to draw (or keep switching). Though, as I type this out, I"m realizing no one knows how to draw or sketch with a mouse anyway, left or right handed. So it's a learning curve for all of us. Though I do think being left-handed comes with a special set of challenges due to the ways in which we have to adapt to a mostly right handed world. The truth of the matter is that things are designed for right handed people, and when it comes to doing the same things left handed, it's generally a greater adaptation for a left handed person.
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While I understand security concerns, if the test is going to be proctored could you not just have the proctor witness the candidate destroying a piece of scratch paper? They could shred it or color over it with a sharpie. My husband has to take proctored exams for various classes, and this is the method they typically use. I don't think a digital whiteboard is going to work at all. It will be a huge disadvantage.
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Barbara and Julie, fair points about the left-hand/right-hand mouse use matters. Julie, I agree with the drawing and writing being a dexterous skill but the element of tactile feedback of the pencil or pen in contract with the surface. I can write down equations with equation symbols and superscript/subscript without even thinking about it.... but just by doing because I can draw. It's really difficult to near impossible to get a mouse to work like that. I have to move the pointer to little button to click on for subscript or superscript just like selecting bold, italics, underline.... but in the time it takes to move pointer to select those, I can already have written it out by change of letter size without even really "thinking" at all. Just doing.
I can draw with a mouse but more or less but not anywhere as intuitive as a pencil/pen for writing text, sketching, etc. We aren't talking about a CAD interface, afterall. We are talking about something more likely to be similar to a poorly executed implementation of Microsoft Paint with less functionality. Yeah, I can pixel my way to a brilliant picture but pixelling work is slow, tedious work and I done it for 30 years. I would need to use a digital pen stylus and graphic tablet to rival sketch paper and pen.
To NCARB,
There is no way around it to get notes and sketches on screen even remotely close to the time it would take to sketch or write notes on paper with a pen or pencil. It might take some individuals time to get proficient but people like Barbara and Julie or even myself will need that at the very least to achieve as close to the same experience in the digital whiteboard.
Using a mouse would be slower and it doesn't matter how many hours or years. It can be practiced 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 10,000 consecutive years and no person will match the speed and intuitiveness as a paper and pencil/pen for rapid sketch and note taking. It is physiologically impossible. While I can type text faster than I write them, I can't sketch with a keyboard or mouse anywhere as fast. I can not easily jot equations because they use special math symbols and all that I can't Alt-code my way to all of them and if I don't have the Alt-code list in front of me, there is no way I'm going to mentally recall the Alt codes for math certain math symbols especially with all the other stuff to retain in my mind for the exam.
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Emily, I suggested the shredding and type of paper shredder because they would:
A) work
B) shred the pieces small enough that it would be beyond practical reason for most people to even have the drive to piece them back together working on the worse possible 'jigsaw puzzle' imaginable in order to disclose their scratch paper notes. Those people won't want to put that much effort. They would have a better chance remember what they saw on the exam and disclose it 5 to 15 minutes after leaving the test center or completing check-out from the remote proctor and disconnecting from the proctor.
C) We're most likely going to dump them in the trash which will later get incinerated at the dump. There is even recycling the paper which would again be adequately re-processed so there is no chance of recovering the exam.
At remote proctoring, there shouldn't be any problem for the proctor personnel to see the paper shredded. The noise shouldn't be a problem at that point. It's not like the issue of having a person shredding paper in the test room at the test center. They just take care of the shredding of the paper in a manner that it won't disturb the other test takers taking an exam. At home, that's not an issue.
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This is completely absurd. Paper is one of our trade's quintessential tools even in the digital age and the digital whiteboard does not even compare in terms of functionality and ease of use. Furthermore, this silent response from the NCARB to all of the complaints is quite disturbing - their role is to further the profession and not to create more hurdles in an already difficult process. If they want to keep this course, extend the testing period to make up for the time lost trying to manipulate this silly proxy to real pen and paper.
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The whiteboard is a horrible idea. Architects use pen and paper to think and sketch problems during the exam. We are taught to use them to think since we enter college, and during our career we continue to use it. Why on our most important tests take this away? The whiteboard is super slow so writing somethings that usually should take a minute it now takes a lot more time away, resulting in wasting our exam time on it. Having to write on the whiteboard math problems or even doing a simple sketch with a mouse is hard and it takes a ridiculous amount of time. This makes the exam harder than what it already is. Also, why take the pen and paper away because of covid by saying its not safe if when I arrive and leave the test center they give me a pen and paper to sign some documents with anyway? They should at least give the pen and paper back to people taking the test at centers.
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