YofoaStudio Since the topic is too outdated, I'll start from the early 1980s. In the early 1980s, President Reagan took office and immediately made significant cuts to the budgets of various government departments due to his strong preference for a small government.
Under these circumstances, the FCC was unable to maintain its previous examination system (requiring individuals with General and higher-level licenses to take exams at the FCC Office; I'm not entirely clear on the specifics, but the Wiki description is not detailed). Therefore, they discussed with ARRL a completely volunteer-organized exam system, where the FCC would only be responsible for issuing licenses and call signs.
By the way, due to budget constraints, the FCC also abandoned its management of CB (Citizen Band) and canceled all licenses, announcing that no further licenses would be required in the future. In the following years, the FCC signed agreements with several clubs (initially 21, later reduced to 14), allowing them to communicate directly with the FCC and submit various forms and documents.
As a result, the FCC's workload was immediately significantly reduced (as they only needed to communicate with a small number of people who were also highly skilled in document handling), which is what later became known as VEC. VE refers to those individuals who are registered within the VEC and have the authority to grade exam papers.
There were many specific grade adjustments in the middle, but that's not the focus today. We are looking at the exam process itself. This system has been running well. Until 2010, in a remote area of the United States (where it was difficult to find VE locally, but there was internet access), the Spalding County Amateur Radio Club (registered with ARRL VEC) tried their first online proctoring, and the exam went very successfully.
After that, CBT (Computer-Based Testing) began to spread widely among various VECs. The author of hamstudy.org, KD7BBC, noticed that while everyone was using computers for proctoring, they were also manually filling out tables using traditional methods. Therefore, he decided to develop a tool (examtool) to assist with table completion.
That's right, examtool initially couldn't organize exams; it only handled assisting with the completion of various forms. However, after a few years, some teams felt that this separation was inefficient and suggested integrating the functions. This led to the creation of examtool tier1.
It also collaborated with hamstudy.org. At that time, examtool could not perform remote grading; VE had to log in to its account on the examinee's computer to grade, but this was not a major issue because there were very few online exams at the time.
Suddenly, it was 2020. The unexpected COVID-19 pandemic forced the entire world into lockdown. Offline exams for amateur radio licenses were also naturally cancelled. However, those who needed a license found themselves with more time on their hands (confined at home), and therefore desperately needed a tool to take online exams. examtool became the obvious choice.
The first exam was successful, but the process itself was extremely chaotic. VE needed the examinees to log into their accounts on their computers, but they couldn't tell the examinees the passwords. As a result, the entire community strongly called for an update to the exam procedures.
Two months later, Tier 2 was launched. While retaining the functionality of logging in and scoring on the考生's computer, it added remote scoring capabilities. Subsequently, KD7BBC and his team made minor adjustments to these tools, but the core framework remained essentially unchanged.
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