Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Catching Exam Cheats With a Spectrum Analyzer

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-did-you-get-for-number-3? dept.

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."

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Exams in other cultures by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    1. Re:Exams in other cultures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Exams in other cultures by RancidPeanutOil · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.