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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."
I use the FSH4 at work - nice little SA - interesting use for it.
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!
TFA says it caught them cheating. It didn't say they were disqualified. For all we know, cheating may have been a prerequisite for a gov't job.
Have gnu, will travel.
No, there is no law that prevents other people from seeing that you are broadcasting signals, much like there is no laws that make it illegal for a police officer to notice that you are smoking a joint.
Spectrum analyzers don't decrypt the signal, they only check for its presence.
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.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
I would imagine that simply having a cell phone signal near you would not be enough to qualify you as a cheater. More likely, they used the presence of the cell phone signal to investigate further for other signs of cheating.
After all, some other ways work too.
Never trust a spiritual leader who cannot dance -- Mr. Miyagi
Too bad it's not the U.S.
If it were, I'd say: make them take a polygraph, a urine test, and walk through a backscatter machine before entering the test room.
I know those are either nearly useless (backscatter and polygraph) and of questionable value to society (urine test), but government and corporations make us take them... let them do it too.
Wow, those R&S analyzers are some serious tools! I was just looking at frequency analyzers over at DealExtreme, where they have a dirt-cheap handheld model that sniffs out cellular frequencies for $60. Or they could have hung a cell jammer in the room for about a hundred. Or if they really thought they had to have the fancy gear, they probably could have hired in a contractor who would have sniffed around for maybe $300 per hour, and known what he was doing.
Was it was really worth the $40,000 they probably spent on them?
Oh, that's right. It's a government organization. Spending money is in their job description.
You were doing fine right up until you pulled that number out of your ass and segued into an anti-government rant. TFA doesn't say it cost 40k to do this.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Cell Jammers are normally illegal.
A far better idea is to make a test center room that is a faraday cage. Now you are blocking everything, not just cell phones.
Test with no collaboration and no open book / Google are not the real world and just lead to people who can pass the test but have no idea on how to do the work.
The tests need be better less about memory and more hands on. Also how many people have jobs when having a book, reference guide, google, a manual, and more is banned and having others working / help with you is a no no?
The FSH4 specified on TFA is not cheap. Add custom programming and you're probably well over $40,000 for three of them even without typical government contract bloat.
http://www.google.com/search?q=FSH4&tbs=shop:1,p_ord:pd
-- The Brory Stool Co.: We accidentally the best stools from behind seven proxies, since 2009.
brb, going to text my friends during their finals
Corruption is a serious issue.
A lot of classes don't teach for understanding. They may try it but if you memorize it enough you can fake understanding by simply reciting everything. Then you promptly forget these things. Perhaps if failing didn't mean we students would have to change majors or drop out with nothing to show for our $50k in debt things might change. Of course there will always be the people that do as little as possible and harass others for the answers..when I was a freshman in college I saw a lot of these people fail out on the first semester because there were several versions of the same test per class.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
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....
Yeah they aren't cheap, the low end of the prices listed on that google search seem to tally with what the base price would have been (I had to work the education discount backwards to figure out the base price) for ordering direct from R&S (we bought a FSH8 recently at uni).
No idea if the police would have got a discount , what the custom setup actually consisted of (it may well have just been setting up the right frequency ranges) or whether they bought any extra options (extra options can seriously add to the cost but i'd think the base model hardware would be sufficiant for this job).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
At our exams, it was always clearly explained in the handbook, in the starting announcements, and on the cover page of the top sheet on each desk's papers that phones and electronic devices are to be on the desk, screen up, and turned off; and that if you're found to be violating that rule it will be considered as evidence of 'possible cheating, or attempting to do so'.
It'd be difficult to misinterpret that.
Do any relevant institutions /not/ have similar rules and procedures?
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.
You'd be better off having something else monitor the servers and push an alert to you on a status change...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Excuse me, but how do you reach a cell phone tower to share data from inside a Faraday cage?
Built-in walkie talkie systems might be able to connect, but most such in modern cell phones are simply free use of the local cell system for other subscribers. They still require the cell towers.
A lot of classes don't teach for understanding. They may try it but if you memorize it enough you can fake understanding by simply reciting everything.
It's true, you have to do a bit more work yourself, but a lot of classes cover things which can be understood in an integrated way. It's just that it sometimes takes a lot of random fact-memorizing to get to that point. You may think you understand integral calculus because you get the concepts, but you don't really understand it until you've been forced to memorize a dozen or so techniques of integration. You need to have them memorized and practiced because, if you don't, no formula sheet is going to help you identify which one is relevant to the given formula.
Now, whether classes do a good job of measuring understanding is another thing, and it could certainly be improved. But I've never let a bad class or a bad instructor get in the way of learning something I need to know.
Perhaps if failing didn't mean we students would have to change majors or drop out with nothing to show for our $50k in debt things might change.
So change majors, or don't fail. I don't really see what this has to do with the school, though. It sucks, but speaking from experience, it's far better than lowering standards.
I speak from experience. I wasn't really ready for college, and managed to fail all but one class my freshman year. I dropped out, and my parents made it very clear: They'd support me if I was getting an education, but if I wasn't, they wouldn't. I got a job and moved out.
A few years supporting myself in the Real World has given me a lot of perspective.
So when my last job evaporated (entire company went under, crushed by the economy), I collected unemployment for awhile, then decided I may as well be doing something useful while I collect unemployment, so I went to a local community college. I took a full term (trimester), participated in a competition and a club, had plenty of time to relax, and got straight A's.
Then I petitioned to get back into my original four-year university. It's much harder to get back if you've been dismissed for academic reasons than to get in the first time, but my awesome time at the community college probably said something. My first semester back, I was in four clubs, including a martial art (Hapkido). I moved from white belt to orange belt, and got straight A's.
That was last spring.
I had an internship last summer (still technically a freshman!), and last semester (also still technically a freshman!), I did pretty much all of the same things, plus I was a TA for a course I'd taken the semester before. Only two bad things happened: I got too busy for Hapkido for awhile, and I got one A-. The other three courses, I got A's. That brings me from a 0.6 GPA when I first came back to above 3.0.
I am loving every minute of it. I'm actually understanding stuff. I'm actually putting the work in. I'm being challenged, and I'm rising to the challenge. (I'm not really learning humility particularly well, at least not tonight...) I can actually appreciate what I'm being taught -- I can cut through the bullshit, I can do the tedious grunt work (and quickly!), and I can get at the heart of what I'm supposed to be learning, and it's beautiful.
If I had been allowed to pass with how badly I did? I'd have sat on my ass and played video games. I'd have coasted through as long as I could manage, then end up at some cushy sysadmin job, at least as long as those last. In fact, that's more or less the trajectory I was on throughout high school, but high school let me get away with it -- which is why I was so fucked up my first year of college.
As it is, I'm seriously considering grad school. Even if I don't, I'm setting myself up to have pretty much any tech job I want when I graduate -- and even the bad classes are fun while I'm here. It's not easy to describe how dramatically different my life is because
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Because they're competing with you for a job you both want? Doesn't need to be personal. Plenty of reasons to try and ruin someone.
You were doing fine right up until you pulled that number out of your ass and segued into an anti-government rant. TFA doesn't say it cost 40k to do this.
TFA didn't have to quote a price. My estimate was based on publicly available information from the marketplace, and was certainly not "pulled out of my ass." My methods are very repeatable, and I suggest you replicate them yourself. I googled for "FSH4", then clicked "Shopping", then sorted by "price: high to low", figuring these units would float to the top of anything else numbered "FSH4", and they certainly did. New unit prices on the set of results ranged from $17,882.25 to $9,220.00, with a median of about $15,000. (The site with the $9,220 price included a "Pricing for U.S. customers only" warning.) I didn't figure they'd get them at the lowball price or at a significant discount, and I didn't figure they'd pay the top price either. The article did mention the manufacturer providing custom programming via "special order," but I did not add money to the estimate because if they were buying three from the manufacturer they may have received some custom work thrown in as part of the price.
And you should also note that I used the word "probably." It's not like I have access to the Taiwanese government's invoices, and could provide the exact figure. "Probably" can imply many things; in this case I placed $40,000 at the center of a rough bell curve of pricing. I think I'm within a standard deviation of how much an American company would pay, but I wouldn't say I have the same confidence in how much a Taiwanese police department would have spent.
Five minutes with Google provided enough data to get a reasonable estimate, and I did it the same way I start shopping for any expensive device.
Since these were purchased by the police, I suspect they may have other practical uses for them in mind. They probably weren't purchased only to catch a handful of cheaters, and then to be tossed aside. They may hope that a few public arrests will serve as deterrents for future cheaters, in which case this might be money well spent. They may plan to use them to detect other criminals. I don't know that, either. I just know that when I googled them I discovered these are some really expensive pieces of kit, and way out of my "casual hobbyist" range.
John
I live in Taiwan, and at any exam that I have ever attended there is one simple rule. If your cellphone even as much as vibrates while you are taking a test you are disqualified at that moment. We are told this beforehand and are recommended to turn off our cellphones.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
I personally know that cheating on the foreign service exam will get you fast-tracked to GLG-20.
- A. Millbarge
Your post is a troll. People get testing all the time after being pulled over for completely unrelated incidents. And that's completely ignoring road blocks specifically set up to look for people who have been drinking.
The simple fact is, MAD is an organization who actively seeks to justify their own existence. They see their primary goal as to punish anyone who drinks. They are now pushing to create a new category for drink, who would also be punishable by law, for what would equate to having one drink.
MAD is an organization which seeming had great ideals when they started but sadly, the world would be a better place without them. They've completely outlived their purpose and are now looking to destroy as many lives as possible; that is, for anyone who dares have even one drink.
When I was at Uni (in the UK), we were reccommended to not only turn phones off, but remove the battery, because in the past they have had phones that were turned off, turn on by themselves and start beeping because the owner had a repeating alarm set (some phones auto-turn on for the alarm if they are off)
I was in an exam once at Uni and somones phone (it was in their bag at the side of the room) did start beeping for whatever reason; one of the invigilators just picked up the entire bag and took it outside and left it there, still beeping, but we couldn't hear it from the exam hall.
Kind of impractical. I have a brother in law who has a faraday cage at Intel and its quite large, but most testing centers I've been into (even smallish ones) are bigger and even then - this faraday cage was quite expensive.