E-Testing - The Future Is Here - NYTimes.com IT'S midterms, but instead of taking the test during class with a No. 2 pencil, you sign up for 7 p.m. Thursday (your biorhythmic high) and march over to the e-test center on campus. And instead of all multiple choice, there's a video-based question, and diagrams with drag-and-drop labels. E-testing centers may be the future of assessment. Penn State opened one in 2007 with about 160 computers. Fall semester, more than 15,000 students took some 64,000 tests. The University of Akron, University of Central Florida and Ball State University have added labs. And Stony Brook University, of the State University of New York, is building a facility with 90 computers, to open in 2013. The idea is not just to advance test-taking through technology, but to free up class time. "Faculty feel the semester is too short, so anything that could give you one or two sessions back is important," says Graham Glynn, who as executive director of Teaching, Learning and Technology at Stony Brook developed the center before leaving in November for Mercy College. He also expects to see more frequent testing, especially with exams no longer needing to be graded by hand. It works like this: Faculty members come up with a bank of comparable questions to make each test different and fair because students don't take the same exam at the same time (100 questions might be tagged with a difficulty level and topic, and the computer would pick 10 for each student to create an approximately equal test). Security is tight at centers, which are monitored via video camera. When students scan their IDs to enter, their photo is printed out for comparison. They can't bring anything into testing areas; even scratch paper has to have a barcode placed on it on the way in and is returned after the exam. "In these facilities, these are lockdown browsers; the only thing you can access is the test," Dr. Glynn says. And essentially there are eyes everywhere, which you can't do in a traditional classroom. Ultimately, the centers could change the way assessment is considered. "This idea of paper-and-pencil testing is so embedded in what we do that we think about it as what we should be doing," says Angela Linse, executive director and associate dean at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at Penn State. But if you get that more sophisticated software, you can get at what students know and how well they know it. Anything that's going to help faculty do that in a better way is going to be widely used. That's the future of it.