Exams Now Reach Out and Touch Students : Education: University uses push-button phone technology to allow students to answer quiz from their homes.

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In what is believed to be the national debut of student testing via push-button phone, students at Governors State University telephoned in the answers to their Psychology 519 quiz from the comfort of home.

“I loved it,” student Teresa Barker said Monday. “It was totally relaxed and really fun.”

Students were allowed to call any time Saturday or Sunday to take a multiple-choice test of 10 questions. They answered by punching in numbers that were registered with computerized voice-mail equipment.

The system lets instructors record up to 30 questions, though only one student can call in at a time. A student has six or seven seconds to think of an answer before the next question is asked--too short a time for a student to cheat by looking up the answer in a book, said Donald Fricker, a professor of management information systems who developed the idea.

The system “gives a student tremendous flexibility,” Fricker said. “The student can be at his most relaxed. He can call in at 4 a.m. if that’s when he’s achieved nirvana and feels he knows the material.”

Psychology Prof. Suzanne Prescott acknowledged that the system is largely limited to testing students’ ability to recall facts.

“You can’t ask a student what he thinks is the impact of 20th-Century literature on lifestyles in the 1950s,” she said. “But I think it’s the wave of the future.”