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

[DNS-and-BIND]

superiority of Western culture? Where, exactly, did I say that? If you're witch-hunting, you'll probably find a witch. The only mention of superiority is in your own mind. I suppose actually living in the East for so many years has a different view. BTW, Mr. Cultural Blinders, the topic in this thread is tests for government employment so I'm not sure that T.A. experience really applies. Anti-Western hate seems appropriate for an academic, however.

Re:Good!

[SanityInAnarchy]

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

Re:Expensive cheats

[Dayze!Confused]

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.