Non-traditional exam seat arrangements

Assuming that seats (chair desks) are identical and can be moved freely within a classroom, this study proposes innovative exam seat arrangements inspired on geometric and architectural patterns, to minimize the possibility of cheating by peaking at a neighbor’s exam. Due to a dearth of information regarding legibility in an exam setting, an experiment to investigate the legibility of various characters in different combinations of angles and distances is performed. The results from the experiment are used to identify a legibility region, which is then used to evaluate the proposed arrangements in rectangular classrooms with the same area, but different length-to-width ratios.