Sorry for the Danish post i hope you can translate it.
The Ministry warns that Microsoft programs can create problems for written exams for students with Mac computers.
Users who have updated the programs to the latest version may experience the programs running slowly, freezing and crashing. This means that the examinees are delayed in their work and that parts of the answers risk being lost, write the Agency for Education and Quality and the Agency for IT and Learning in a notice to schools.
I know it sounds crazy, but a better free alternative exists.
It sounds insane to me they would use a suite where they have no control over its state… Can’t they at least block the updates? Just imagine you’re a student and your success depends on the incompetence of others
This is an excellent lesson to learn in school since it happens a lot in life.
Fair enough, but if it was at work or something you can at least say, ‘eh at least I still get paid’ Here you have no recourse options.
edit: Having read the translation now. It seems the students do have a choice in which software suite they use. So I guess they did have a recourse. So in the end it was their own responsibility. I guess it was a good lesson then.
I can’t speak for every University, but some have a way for you to appeal issues like this to the Dean.
Just a note to avoid some confusion some people may have: gymnasium in denmark is roughly the same as high schools in the US. While I’m sure the problem also affects university students, the focus of this article is on the high school students specifically.
I would imagine they have a similar setup as here in Norway (who’s also experiencing this issue) where the students own the machine and they aren’t centrally managed, especially the Mac’s
Yeah I assumed they would be centrally managed, but they are not apparently. So then I don’t really see why they would get a time extension to be honest. You could easily game that then and just fake it crashing.
A single person experiencing an error is bad luck and may go through an apeals process. Half a class experiencing the same error jeopardizes the legitimacy of the exam for enough students that they decided to handle it collectively. It may be a third party tool but it is one they are expected to use which changes things. Had it been a few students using libre office they would probably be out of luck as they would have used non standard software.
Another important note is that many exams now require digitally handing in the assignment, so the only alternative to writing the assignment in a text editor would likely have been to scan a handwritten one and convert it to pdf, if that was even allowed. So while particular hardware and software isn’t required, the limitations of the exam makes it impossible to completly avoid errors such as these.
What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.
LaTeX, code and compile your documents instead of fighting with word.
While I agree with you that LaTeX is an impressive tool, I would not choose it for an exam whith a short duration. It is great, but for short documents that should be written quickly, I don’t think it’s the best tool.
I (almost) only use LaTeX now, I find it easier than having to manually set headings etc. I find it great even for just one page notes.
The few times I do not use it is when I have to colab on a document with someone else.
Honestly Markdown is perfectly fine 99% of the time. It also has many advantages by just being much simpler
OnlyOffice is nice, but a tad controversial. It’s UI is much much closer to how 365 looks.
What’s controversial about OnlyOffice?
I only recently discovered it, and I’ve been happy with it so far. I’ve found the interface a little more snappy and easy to use than LibreOffice.
I don’t remember exactly, but something about it’s license maybe.
Obviously you need to replace your macOS with something better.