General Exam Instructions

Your ASTR 123 Midterm exam is now available. Read all of the content below and then check the choice at the bottom of the page to login to the exam.

DO NOT GO DIRECTLY TO THE LOGIN LINK WITHOUT READING THIS FIRST

The exam is entirely ON line and accessible from the exam link at the bottom of the page.

Notes:

1. Your login name is your last name* in all lower case letters

*those of you with the same last name will have a login name where the first letter of your first name as part of your login.

Therefore, suppose there is a Bob Jones and a Kristi Jones in class. Their respective login names would be bjones and kjones.

Asian students need to pay particular attention to probable last name duplication.

In addition, pay attention to these naming protocols and examples:

1. No hypens or spaces of apostrophes allowed; just letters, therefore
   • O'leary becomes oleary
   • Ray-Rouse becomes rayrouse
   • Da Silva becomes dasilva
   
   
   
2. This mostly applies to asian students as sometimes your first names and last names are very similar so you might run into this siutation:
   • Tong Liu and Tuo Liu becomes toliu and tuliu
   • Xiao Wang and Xuewei Wang becomes xiwang and xuwang

2. Your password is the last 4 digits of your UO ID number.

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READ THIS!!!!! READ THIS!!!!!! READ THIS!!!!!!

3. It is generally a good idea when taking these exams to use another application to actually write out your answers (for the essay questions) and then cut and paste from that application into the exam page running in your browser.

Therefore if your machine should crash while filling in the exam answers on the exam page (this does happen) or you have trouble submitting the exam, you will still have a record of your answers, stored in some file on your machine, that you can paste back into the exam page if you need to take the exam again.

Note, despite this recommendation, every term there are students that choose not to do this and have some problem submitting their answers. I would therefore urge all students to adopt the procedure suggested above.

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4. THERE IS A FOUR HOUR TIME LIMIT TO TAKE THIS EXAM. Your login is time stamped from where you first access the exam to when you submit it. That means you can't "preview" the exam a day in advance. Once you access the exam, the clock starts ticking. Also note, that if you submit the exam more than once, only the most recent submission is retained on the server. So make sure that your last submission contains all of your exam responses.

5. I am well aware that there is no control over people consulting the web notes and the entire Internet when taking this exam. That's fine - the questions have been designed with that in mind (that is you generally can't just Google for the "answer" you have to think about how to apply the material learned to answering the question). Also make sure that you do not cut and paste from the web lecture notes and call that an answer to the question. That will be immediately recognized.

6. In the past there has been collaborative test taking among various students. Although some of you have been working on the homework assignment together, each of you must take the exam individually without consulting with other students. I repeat, Each person needs to take the exam by themselves.

Nonetheless, every term there are people that ignore this rule thinking - "oh hell, he will never figure this out..."

I have many foolproof checks that are able to detect duplicate or near duplicate exams - so collaborative exam taking will always be detected using my methodology.

And again, despite this warning students continue to take the exam together. In one case Fall 2014, 11 students did the exam togther and all of this was detected. Therefore, I have now instituted a point penalty on all exams taken together which varies with severity.

1. Check the box below

I have read the instructions and am ready to login to the ASTR 123 Mid Tern exam and take it BY MYSELF. I understand I have 4 hours from the time I login to the time I submit.
I do not wish to take the exam at this time