Catching Exam Cheats With a Spectrum Analyzer

angry tapir writes "Police in Taiwan have used a set of spectrum analyzers to catch at least three people suspected of cheating on an exam by monitoring them for mobile phone signals. Officers used three FSH4 analyzers specially configured by the German manufacturer Rohde & Schwarz to monitor an exam in south Taiwan for prospective government workers."

Comments

Exams in other cultures

[DNS-and-BIND]

I have lived outside our Western culture for a while now, and there is a big difference in the idea of tests and examinations. We have the idea that the test is there to see who is competent to get the job. Simple, right? Nope, it's our own cultural biases that make us think this way. Elsewhere, it's all about getting what comes after the test. Your actual skill is irrelevant, not really a worthy topic of discussion. It's all about the job that you can get, or the university that you can get into, or whatever. The idea that if you don't have the skills then you're not qualified doesn't translate. Eastern cultures have a long history of examinations and take a different view than we do. I know a teacher who, after repeatedly warning against cheating in his class, was fired for daring to catch his students cheating in class. The students lost face, you see, and the teacher (not the students' cheating) was identified as the cause of the problem. True story.

Re:Exams in other cultures

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a teacher who, after repeatedly warning against cheating in his class, was fired for daring to catch his students cheating in class. The students lost face, you see, and the teacher (not the students' cheating) was identified as the cause of the problem. True story.

It's very believable. I just started working in a university in Malaysia. At the start, I found from my colleagues about the pervasiveness of cheating and plagiarism in the university. However, since I found that there was very little guard against cheating, I believed that the students just thought that they would lose out if they do not cheat. That is, the system is at fault here rather than the students.

Hence, I designed my courses to make copying and cheating difficult.

It didn't take long for me to realize that my style of teaching totally bombed on the students. Many did not like it at all. They believed that what I did was "destroying their future" (-exact words they wrote in my evaluation), and they went to the dean to complain about this "most stupid lecturer they have ever seen" (-exact words). Yet another student commented, "you think you are in US or Japan, but this is malaysia" (-exact words).

True story. I only hope that after a few generations, things will start to change.

Re:Exams in other cultures

[RancidPeanutOil]

It's hard to explain really, but it involves face and the assumption of entitlement. If you've gotten to the exam stage, it's just a formality to pass the test, and preventing you from doing so is assumed to be contrary to societal norms. I'm not the OP of course, but I too have spent time outside the west, and proctored a few exams. What the OP relates is accurate. We had some discussions about ethics in one class, and the students were utterly mystified by the western attitude towards cheating. The best students in the class asked how the top-graded students could abandon their lesser classmates like that. If you have the knowledge and you refuse to share it with everyone, you're seen as being very arrogant and greedy. These are students who will walk up to a student being questioned and hit them on both sides of the face, grab their chin, and say to the teacher "see - he's stupid. Don't ask him questions, we need to help him." This, by the way, is how students pass the TOEFL in asia to get into U.S. universities, despite any lack of technical skills. This is why the GRE is useless for foreigners (perfectly acceptable to text and look up things on wikipedia during administration). And, incidentally, it is why all the great math scores that come out of standardized testing in Asian tiger nations showing an achievement gap are utterly baseless and useless as a comparative measure. The scores are of the top students, and all the other scores are the lesser students copying answers from the top students. The teachers actively promote cheating in most public, non-IB schools, as well as at the university level. They brazenly cheat from the youngest ages because there is no corollary to our ethical prohibition.

Re:Exams in other cultures

[Anonymous Coward]

I just finished giving my exams in a foreign culture (I teach at a university in Beijing). My experience is different, but that may be because the college I teach for specifically prepares students for going overseas for graduate school. Not only am I encouraged to identify cheaters, I am given a bonus for catching anyone cheating. In spite of the fact that the rooms can be cold, putting one's hands into pockets to warm them up is considered an indication of cheating, even if after the fact it is shown the pockets were empty. And in spite of the fact that I am an IT instructor, I have to drill into my students brains that the types of plagiarism that have gotten them so far in China is an academic death sentence in most Western universities.

That said, causing a loss of face to the guys who manage our IT infrastructure by pointing out that the school could get better results and save money by hiring a couple of teenagers away from managing an internet cafe has caused me a moderate amount of pain. And that was after their improper servicing of the (not sealed) lead acid batteries in the UPS rack caused a fire destroying the majority of the schools IT infrastructure for about 1/2 the semester.

Good!

[laughingcoyote]

Catch more of them!

I'm sick of the widespread mentality that cheating is not only desirable but necessary, and that if done for the purpose of "getting ahead", it's alright. I sure wouldn't want a doctor or a lawyer who cheated their way through. I want one who took every test honestly and demonstrated they actually learned the material.

Maybe if we put back the concept of "Cheat or lie (as an adult) once, career suicide for good", we could eliminate this crap. It's infected everything from police to politicians, and programmers to paramedics. If we can find better ways to ensure people actually know what the hell they're doing, instead of demonstrating they can read letters from a cheat sheet, good.

Though, part of the blame also lies with those who design the tests. Multiple choice and fill in the blank tests are obsolete. The best tests would give the taker a project to do, and should be made difficult enough that collaboration is allowed and encouraged. After all, in real world scenarios, collaboration and the ability to research are important skills at nearly everything. As an alternative, one could at the very least give essay questions that would require careful thought and don't have a single "right answer" that can be copied in.

Of course, that takes more effort to grade than running a bunch of sheets through a reader. Imagine that, giving something actual thought.

Re:Expensive cheats

[Anonymous Coward]

And, when drunk driving laws were first introduced, simply having a BAC above a certain number was not enough to guarantee a DUI conviction- they had to actually prove you were impaired.

But then MADD pushed to make it a 'per se' law- meaning just having a Blood Alcohol Content above a certain number was enough to make you guilty. Doesn't matter if you are a hardcore drinker and .090 barely makes you buzzed- you're illegal. Meanwhile, that 110-pound girl over there who's never drank before and is obviously crocked out of her gourd? She's only .075, and is perfectly legal.

The point being- laws which start of well meaning, often are twisted into draconian parodies of themselves. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the rule against 'cheating on a test with a cell phone' morphs into 'having a cell phone during a test'. After all, maybe you erased the incriminatory text messages before handing it over, or maybe you were about to cheat....

Re:Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've presented homework projects, along with a critique of the list of answers I noticed the TA left lying in the study area, and carefully did expanded work to show that I'd personally masterd the material and gone beyond those answers. It was very embarassing to the TA, who should never have been hired, but also embarassing to the professor because my paper was presented to the class as a whole as part of a surprise presentation program, and as soon as I presented the copy of the list of answers, I was kicked out of the room. It took a direct and unscheduled meeting with the professor, whose secretary kept messing up my scheduled appointments, to present him with my actual paper for review: my TA had rejected it outright and never shown it to him for any review or signing.

Sadly, my aggressiveness in demonstrating the ease and presence of cheating was accepted by the professor, but it was clear that the middle management and underlings in his department accepted it as part of standard practice, and "they would evaluate" whether students were fit to graduate, rather than actually using the tests. They let me know, after their problems with the professor with this, that they would jeopardize my funding and my PhD if this ever went further.

So, I can mention it anonymously on Slashdot, but if I told the relevant Dean at the time, I'd probably never graduate.