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New Smartwatches Allow Students To Cheat On Exams
HughPickens.com writes: The Independent reports that smartwatches that allow students to cheat on exams are being openly sold on Amazon. An advert for one such watch, called a "New 2016 Student 8GB cheating watch," is offered on Amazon for $51.68. "This watch is specifically designed for cheating on exams with a special programmed software. It is perfect for covertly viewing exam notes directly on your wrist, by storing text and pictures in the 8GB memory storage. It supports various file formats, such as: TXT, MP3, JPG, GIF, WAV, WMV, AVI, etc. It has an emergency button, so when you press it — the watch's screen display changes from text to a regular clock, and blocks all other buttons." The watch has garnered good reviews. "this is amazing. it helps me cheat on my test and it is smart and i never got caught," writes one reviewer. Joe Sidders, the deputy head at Monkton Combe senior school, in Bath, told BBC News that such devices were making exams a "nightmare to administer". "I expect the hidden market for these sorts of devices is significant, and this offering on Amazon is just the tip of the iceberg." A spokesman for Amazon said the company did not want to comment on the sale of the cheating watches. But professors are striking back. "My microbiology professor does a watch check every time we have a test," says Abigail Lauze. "If it's not an old school analog it has to come off and go in the cell phone bin."
... New exam rule: no wearing of wristwatches, of any kind, while taking an exam. You want to know the time left? See this big clock on the wall. This solution seems too obvious. Am I missing something?
and roll up sleeves if present.. This will be quickly overcome..
Can't any smart watch do shit like this?
"Others follow us sell may be fake and bad quality.Pls check seller is makesdo" Why would I want to by that shit?
Everyone on the internet laughed when I started Tinfoil University, where every lecture hall and, indeed, every room is a Faraday cage. But who's laughing now?
Seriously, I'm asking. For some reason, my smartphone doesn't get a very good signal anymore, which severely limits my ability to keep track of who's laughing about what on the internet these days.
You learn for your own sake. If you are cheating, you won't hurt anyone except yourself, unless the school does something stupid like grade on a curve rather than test actual competence - and then its grades are meaningless anyway.
"If it's not an old school analog it has to come off and go in the cell phone bin."
How about no watch devices period? Don't some smart watches look a bit too much like an analog watch, or am I mistaken? Nothing on the wrist might be better.
The miniaturization of electronics and even full computers is a huge revolution, and it creates all sorts of growing pains. From a security perspective, I find it very scary. I got my M.S. from University of Michigan and they have a big project to create a wireless sensor node (microcontroller, wireless radio and imaging sensor) smaller than 1 mm^3. Insane.
To be clear, it isn't Amazon that is promoting this watch, it's a company calling themselves "MKSD". The amazon employees should exercise a little more quality control in their submissions as this is going to mar their corporate image big time.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
At least at the college/university level.
What's a watch, grandpa?
Nobody uses those anymore.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If it's a well written exam, access to 8GB of cheating info wouldn't help...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Exams which test memorization are pointless. Better to make them problem-solving based, challenging and open-book. That way cheaters will still do poorly. It's more a problem of lazy exam creators than anything.
So...this is for kids too stupid to use a tiny piece of paper and a 0.5m mechanical pencil? Cause that solution costs $5 and has worked for decades.
we printed in a tiny font on my dad's laser printer
If a student is caught cheating once, this will be mentioned in his final grade (the paper he/she delivers when applying somewhere). "This student has cheated."
A more interesting aspect is we can now print electronic circuits with their own near field power into people's clothes.
Resistance is useless. Why are you testing rote facts instead of useful concepts?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I don't get why memorization is still so important in exams. If there are commonly available tools that allow you to get the correct answer in the allotted time, what is the problem with that? Sure, there are things you will simply have to have memorized, but if you have to take the time to look those up, you will simply run out of time in a well designed exam. My best prof's exams were open book, open door. You could head to the library during the exam if you wanted. Of course, if you did, you would never finish the exam.
One design flaw with this cheaters watch: It's the BIGGEST watch I've seen in YEARS. It looks like a toy and it draws attention to itself. you walk in with this big bulky black square no your wrist and people's eyes are drawn to it...either to laugh at the most awkward watch made in since the old calculator watches in the 70's/80's, or to wonder why anyone would wear such a bulky watch in the first place. Guaranteed to get noticed by profs everyone (and most of your friends too...)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Back when I was going to school I used my Fossil Wrist PDA to manage pertinent data rewired for my studies. I could also drive the teachers nuts by controlling the TVs with the built in infrared. Kids will always find a way. Just go to you tube and search for test cheating rubber band.
Professors and teachers who are too lazy to write good exams that properly evaluate a student's understanding beyond memorization of facts are the ones shaking in their boots... whole disciplines are based on this sort of lazy intellect that favors those privileged with good memories. Meanwhile, those who give open-book,open-notes exams just roll their eyes at all the hacks masquerading as "professors".
Dating myself, but we had the same issues with calculators when they became programmable. I know a guy who cheated with his HP J7 (I think that was the model) because it knew all the physics formulas, all he had to do was plug numbers in the right boxes. It was obvious to the professors what happened because he never showed anything on paper except for the right answer. Calculators were banned the next semester, but the class provided a couple of the old simple models for those who really needed them.
In Calculus we were told to go ahead, because a calculator really did not help. A "correct" answer was only 1 out of 20 points generally, and the other 19 were the steps to find the answer. No steps was no credit, and you failed.
Today people can do much more with much less device, so the answer is simple. As you and GP both said, ban the device during testing.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
kicked out and called to the principle/director whoever is sitting on top, maybe penalized just for possession of such a watch because it implies intended fraud.
Good luck!
I had teachers/professors that would just write open book/open note tests. If you needed to reference your notes for these tests, you were pretty much sunk. It meant that you didn't understand the topic, and no amount of reference material was going to help you learn it in the allotted time.
I'd like to see you're fancy printed electronic circuits work without resistance.
if the answer is not in the book, or computer or neighbor... then your teacher is just a sadistic asshole.
Not at all. I've taken tests that were 100% open book BUT if you had to spend a lot of time looking stuff up you were going to fail the test due to time constraints. The point of open book tests is to avoid needlessly penalizing folks for forgetting some minor bit of trivia or a formula. It's not supposed to be a substitute for actually learning the material.
My old professor would just tell us that it runs on power it better not be visible in any way, shape or form or he would rip up your test. and of course a few idiots thought they could get away with it on the first test and got their test torn up... but mid-terms no one even dared try.
And we would like to see you use a spell-checker.
Since when is a test time for a teacher to goof off? Walk around and watch students making sure they're not paying a little too much attention to their wrists. Want to know the easiest way to cheat in math and science classes? They're those TIs!
Finally someone can justify getting a smart-watch.
I've been in industry for 20 years now. No one has asked me to perform long division on paper.
And did you think the purpose of doing it on paper was the end goal? If so you completely missed the point. The purpose was to help you actually learn what is happening in a fundamental way AND to practice arithmetic in the process. I learned long division in the third grade. Doing it by hand helped my brain develop and it taught me lots about math beyond simply a process to do division. The point is to learn to think and hopefully you learn some math along the way.
No one has asked me to solve a laplace transform without a calculator.
But if they had simply handed you a calculator with it programmed in then you would never have learned it in the first place. I see that routinely in students I have tutored. The ones that simply whip out the calculator immediately struggle to learn what is actually going on and they almost invariably do worse than those students who slog through it by hand and actually learn the material.
No one has asked me to sit in silence for 20 minutes reciting things from memory.
Really? I do a version of that every day in my job. I have all sorts of things I do from memory and I'm pretty sure you do too if you think about it.
No one has forced me to solve some kind of hard problem without the ability to go get some reference material.
What are you going to do when there is no reference material? If every problem you solve has a reference available for it then you are doing nothing but solving trivial problems.
Do it like India showed us last week, all exams are do be done in swimming gear, preferably on glass desks.
Really I want one if I can get an SDK for it. Not to cheat but to write my own apps for it.
$50 and a nice big screen is kind of cool.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I remember one class (HS, circa 1990) where we had to "clear the EEPROMs" on our TI-85s because somebody was caught with their notes all typed in, which must have taken longer than actually studying.
We made a program that emulated the flash process without doing anything, right down to the cursor blinking for the right count etc. We had too many useful programs that we didn't want to lose, like one called "SuperFactor!" which could do up to 4th order polynomial factoring...
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
According to ray kurzweil, we are going to have memory nanites injected into our brains next year! The singularity is coming in 2 years. I'm not as optimistic as ray, but it does seem like the tech to look up the entirety of human knowledge is eventually going to be inextricably linked to the human taking the test. We should probably start planning for that.
Maybe the skills of the future have more to do with using tech to access information than filling your head. I try to think things through for myself, but honestly i don't know why when the end result of someone just copying from stack overflow seems just as good as my result. looking shit up and copying it is the skillset of the future.
What we probably need are tests that acknowledge that and students can't just come in armed with a list of answer indices, but actually have to dig around for the right information.
I tend to think that if a device is actually needed for their health, they're not going to be too big on modding it to add more functionality at risk of damaging it.
I think you hugely underestimate how motivated people are to cheat and the lengths they will go to to get ahead.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unless the degree aimed for is worthless in itself (a far to common occurrence these days), the only effect this has is students hurting their own skills. And once you have an aural exam or an advanced exam that requires actual understanding, that will come back to bite the cheaters.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If you can cram enough information into a watch to help you with the test, then that sounds more like a problem with the test -- students should be allowed to bring any materials they want with them into the exam.
If an exam question relies on rote memorization of some fact, formula, or theorem, that question doesn't belong on the test since in the real world the student will have access to Google for those trivia questions.
The exam should test how well students can apply these facts to solve problems, not on the memorization of trivla.
I always loved open-book exams, even when the instructor warned "My open book tests are much harder". I liked those even better than exams where you're allowed to bring in a single sheet of note paper, which was always an exercise in how small I could write.
Because some "rote facts" help you determine that certain concepts are bullshit. One example i read about is that a college professor at a prominent California university was teaching his Black Studies students that a slave uprising in the French Caribbean helped kickstart the French Revolution. His students ate it up because this was the first time they had been taught how big of an influence on World History "their" culture had had. The biggest problem with that whole thing was not that most of those students were not descended from anything relating to the slave uprising and so it really wasn't their culture. No, the biggest problem was that the slave uprising happened about 12 years after the French Revolution so it could not possibly have had any influence on the French Revolution.
Yes, sometimes facts help us weed out bogus "concepts". And for math and physics students, it is absolutely necessary to understand the formulas and how to do all that by hand if you are going to pursue any kind of related career because having the fundamental understanding helps you to know what the computers are doing. And actually memorizing addition and multiplication tables really is necessary to considering one's self a semi-educated adult.
Then good luck passing my interview process.
(why do you keep squinting at your watch? you're supposed to be writing source on this white board to perform Boolean operations on quad tree)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Teachers tend to rely more on behavior than whatever gadget students use to cheat.
These smart watches are not that different from regular cheat sheets in the way they are used. And while they store more data than a piece of paper, that's actually a trap for the cheating student. No one expects you to learn 8GB of stuff, which means that the watch will be filled with useless data the cheater will have to sort through in less than ideal conditions.
The solution is to design exams so that having a cheating watch is of no help. Open-book exams are the best. Disclaimer: I'm a prof, all my exams are open-book. If you didn't study beforehand, the textbook is of little help.
I know this probably sounds strange but I fully support things like this existing.
The reason people use them and the reason they help on exams is many exams are 100% memorization based. EVERYTHING that students can do to fight back against those kinds of exams should be done. There is really no way to justify a memorization based exam existing anymore. Memorization is something humans are getting worse at physically due to changes in the brain.
Your brain basically has X neural cells and it can change what it uses them for. As technology has improved many of those cells have been tasked to do processing instead of memory. There is just no real reason to memorize anymore and it is completely ineffective. Most memorized material is forgotten within a few days at most.
I really like my undergraduate engineering exams. Most of them where open book, notes, calculator etc and we where tested on actual understanding of the material. If you did not know what you where doing you would fail the exam and no amount of notes, books etc could help that. If you knew what you where doing you spent your time working on the problem and looking up any formulas, constants etc you would need. I have even had a few exams that where open internet.
We have the ability to look up pretty much any fact at any time. What we don't have the ability to do is instantly understand those facts. That is why you have to learn how to understand the material but any details you can look up.
It won't be too long before students will have microchips in their heads and can download pretty much anything they want into them. Memorization exams will die but professors will have to be fought at every step and dragged into the modern world kicking and screaming. In the end it will probably even end up in some supreme court case where it is made very clear you can't force someone to turn off a microchip inside their brain just because you belong to an archaic belief system and can't handle that memorization is not a replacement for understanding and education.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
As someone who has done exceptionally well and also quite poorly on exams, I've learned that exams, even the ones which try to test method instead of memorization, really only test one thing well: practice. Understood everything right away? You'll do poorly on the test, because there's not enough time for someone who doesn't have the routine that comes with practice. Didn't understand anything but crammed hard? You'll do poorly on the test, because you won't know how to apply your "knowledge". Consistently good test scores tell you one thing about a person: They do what is asked of them. It doesn't tell you anything about problem solving skills. It doesn't even tell you what they know, because in all likelihood they've forgotten more than the person who understood it right away and needed too much time during the test. It doesn't tell you if the person can come up with their own solutions. A test score doesn't tell you if the person could excel if challenged.
Who has the time to comb through page after page on their watch to find an answer? Unless the test is relatively short or the user only needs to jog his memory on one or two questions there's no way you'd have the time to do this.
Back when I was in school most of my teachers gave us either one page of paper or a note card that we could use as a 'cheat sheet'. I used to fill it up with all kinds of formulas and equations, but rarely actually looked at it during the exam because hunting for the info took too much time, and by writing it all down I already memorized it. This was actually a great study tool that I used even when we weren't allowed a cheat sheet (I obviously didn't bring it to the exam). I remember seeing people with the front and back of the paper absolutely crammed with info at a 6 point font (some even brought a magnifying glass to read it) and would consult it for almost every question. They were usually the ones crying for more time to finish.
And no, that pun was not intended. Sometimes they just work out that way.
You still don't "get it". Let me explain, using your example.
Bad test question: In what year or years did the French Revolution take place?
Bad test question: In what year did the slave uprising in the French Caribbean occur?
Good test question: Explain the role that the Slave Uprising had on the French Revolution. Justify your answers.
Any kids who didn't pay attention or know the answer will give you a pile of bullshit. The kids who paid attention will write "It had no role because it didn't happen until after the Revolution."
The problem is teachers who are lazy or overloaded with students, or who simply don't understand how to give good tests. If people can cheat using a "crib sheet", high-tech or low-tech, then all you're testing is their ability to memorize their fucking crib sheet.
How about putting it inside a ring? wear it facing inward, nobody would ever know.
While the advertising for this watch is truly disgusting, it seems really likely to only hamper lazy teachers who focus on meaningless memorization rather than comprehension. The watch doesn't do any real kind of good cheating, like let you access the Internet or other students. It just serves as a place to keep your krib sheets. And from the advertisement quote that I used in my title, I suspect the quality isn't very good either. Life is an open book test, school tests should be open book to and focus more on student comprehension rather than just the ability to memorize countless facts and formulas.
Some of the best classes I ever had were high school Physics I and II with a teacher who understood this and said that all tests were open book. He even suggested that if we didn't want to waste time flipping all through the book trying to find the right formula that we could and should make sheets of all the formulas that we thought we might need, so that we could access them quicker. The exams didn't depend on just giving back the formula or plugging in a couple single digit integers and doing grade school math, they depended on understanding the problem presented and knowing the right way to approach it. These were great classes and he was a very good teacher who understood what was really important.
Sure, you could take away all watches and have the students just use the clock on the wall, but that only encourages lazy teachers to make more poor tests based on memorization rather than comprehension. And you're likely still going to favor rich cheaters who can get the next generation of fancy cheating gimmicks over the poorer or more honest students. Far better would be to make all tests open book and open notes and require the teachers to design tests that measure comprehension, not memorization.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
... because they are FAR MORE LIKELY than whites, per capita, to cheat on exams.
Does the truth hurt?
The Alcalde's gaze was impassive. "The 'unaided skills' test, Miss Washington. There is nothing whatsoever _naked_ about it." ... Miss Washington." Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. "We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We're not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments -- without networks, even without computers."
"It might as well be, Mister." Patsy was speaking in English now, and with none of the light mocking tone that made her a minor queen in her clique. It was her image and voice, but the words and body language were very un-Patsy. Juan probed the external network traffic. There was lots of it, but mostly simple query/response stuff, like you'd expect. A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie's remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington -- at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn't much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy's father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn't have to talk to him in person. Patsy's image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. "In fact," she continued, "it's worse than naked. All their lives, these -- we -- have had civilization around us. We're damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk."
"We are putting no one at risk
"Next you'll be teaching rock-chipping!" said Patsy.
The Alcalde ignored the interruption. "Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can't, we have not properly educated them!" He paused, glared all around the room. "But this is no survivalist school. We're not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen -- perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you'll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity."
I'm going to get me one of those and put flight plans on those.
It looks a lot more comfortable than a kneeboard!
thanks, Slashdot!
...we did it the hard way. We used our IT86 graphic calculators to store chemistry and stats formulas. We also wrote on the desk in pencil. I'm glad technology has carried the torch bringing the art of cheating to a new level.
but any kind of device in sight other than the school-sanctioned TI-83 is grounds for dismissal.
Cue in smart asses hacking their Ti-83, replacing the guts while keeping the cover.
That's not even news: a long time ago, there used to be an article about some student replacing the logic board of their Ti-83 with a supperior Texas Instrument, that still used the same button layout and more or less the same screen size, but with more advanced functions.
Nowadays, you could pack quite a lot of computing power and notes in the same form factor.
It's beginning with a few geeks doing it for the sake of it,
and it will finish with cheap chinese manufacturer selling ready to use kit (logic board where you just need to screw around your school's sanctionned cover over it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
you know what the statement means so readjust your fedora and comb out that neck beard. of course a student isn't going to turn in his hearing aid or pacemaker you ignorant asshole.
How about we just rethink the necessity of tests that are just regurgitating information from memory, and replace them with tests that require cognitive thinking or creative reasoning?
Give every kid a laptop with an open internet connection and let them Google during the test to their hearts content. Having to write a sentence or two about the repercussions of Columbus sailing the ocean blue in 1492 is probably a better exercise than just asking what year it happened.
And when was the last time you had to answer a complicated question at work and you weren't allowed to use your technology to figure it out?
When you start getting into more substantial tests later in life you can devolve to proctored testing facilities where they make you dress down to a hospital gown and hand you a pencil.
Nope. Looks like you got it. Even from the summary:
Sounds good. Every student gets a bag. Puts his/her name on it. Then puts ALL of his/her electronics into the bag. They can be reclaimed AFTER the test ON THEIR WAY OUT OF THE CLASSROOM.
This is what you do in real life. Important exams have requirements to limit the possibility of cheating except in incredibly trusting environments. Actuarial Exams, Bar Exams, Professional Responsibility Exams, all of them have very brief "permitted items" lists and prohibit non-analog watches. Some especially trusting colleges and graduate schools do not put such strict rules in place--"take home exams" are part of the culture in some places where cheating is not a problem, for example, especially for 24-hour exams.
if a device is actually needed for their health, they're not going to be too big on modding it to add more functionality at risk of damaging it.
No necessarily need to mod them.
Case in point: cochlear implant (i.e. "cybernetic ear" used to give back hearing to deaf people). There's an electrode array directly stimulating the auditive nerve.
Normally, there's a box with a microphone picking up sound, processing it (basically: fast fourrier-transforming it) and feeding the signal to the nerve stimulator.
This coarsly simulates hearing sound.
As the spectral resolution of the thing isn't stellar, it's very sensitive to noise.
Trying to listen to a phone in a noisy environment is really hard (= so hard that this is a test for quality for each new generation of device. "how much is the new one better at listenning on the phone in a sub-optimal circumstance")
To simplify it, there's a way to plug-in an aux input to it (to bypass the effect of the noisy environment).
Even 15 years ago, while I was studying medicine, the box had an AUX jack already there.
I'm betting that the latest generation can be paired over bluetooth.
(Have moved away to other field of specialty).
That begs to be exploited as a form of secret radio earpiece:
e.g.: kid fully deaf with bilateral implants.
left cochlear implant still used to pick up from mike so kid seem to be hearing normally.
right cochlear implant bluetooth paired to a smartphone outside the class room (but still within range) used by an acomplice to transmit informations.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well when i was in college the cheating was so rampant that the teachers made the tests open book . Memory based questions were minimised and problem based questions and subjective questions and design based questions were introduced and the time was reduced.
Why should the race always be to the swift, or the Jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well I say, "Cheating is the gift man gives himself."
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
I don't need a watch to help me cheat on exams. The only exams I get now involve medical professionals. I need a watch to help me cheat on my wife.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If you are in Michigan, drink only bottled water
Most exams can be written in a way where notes don't really help, or at least they help with things that are not important to test. Exams are supposed to verify understanding, not memorization skills. If your exam can be cheated through with mere memorization, the exam is bogus anyway - it doesn't test what it should be testing.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
actually memorizing addition and multiplication tables really is necessary to considering one's self a semi-educated adult
That's bullshit. Memorizing these simply means you lack the capacity to actually do the calculations fast enough. If you actually understood the basics of algebra and number theory, you could use them to perform the calculations quickly. Since you have no understanding, you pretend that memorizing tables is somehow fundamental. No, it isn't. It's a crutch for pupils who have no understanding, and for teachers who can't make anyone understand because, perhaps, they don't understand themselves. This anecdote gives you a gist of what's involved in fast mental math. What you are supposed to memorize largely isn't numeric results, but techniques.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I had a Dumbwatch, I flunked all my exams.
Table-ized A.I.
One of my friends in grade school had one of these. It probably took longer to enter the equation than do it by hand, though.
What's a watch, grandpa?
The one piece of jewelry other than a wedding ring a man can wear in public in any situation, no questions asked.
The one gadget you own that is pretty much guaranteed to continue to do its job no matter how badly you neglect or abuse it.
So always having to calculate 2+3=5 is somehow better than memorizing 2+3=5? Some of that basic algebra and number theory is based on knowing some key facts. Sometimes having the basics memorized is very useful. Being able to quickly run calculations for larger numbers is also useful. I was required to memorize at least all the single digit addition tables and multiplications through 12*12. I don't remember all of them any more but generally remember the smaller ones and quickly calculate the larger ones of that group. I will agree that memorizing anything beyond the single-digit tables is not of any value.
No, the point is that if anybody had bothered to teach those supposed adult college kids some basic facts (the dates of those events) or had the asshole college professor decided to use those actual facts, then he would not have been able to lead his students astray. But the teacher was able to teach falsehoods by using the mantra that "memorizing rote facts is useless" to not teach the facts that showed the lie of his concept.
My point was that the teacher in question was using the "no facts" mantra to his advantage to teach bogus concepts. His students ate it up because they liked what they were hearing and they had already been taught that facts only get in the way of learning so they didn't bother looking for them.
Why don't you actually prepare students to face the real world and make all the tests open note and open book? I realize this is a dis-service to those pupils who later become stranded on a deserted island and need to know the differential equation for continually compounding interest. "If only I had been forced to memorize that equation," one would lament, "then I would be able to know how many coconuts to charge you for the use of my fishing pole!"
Indeed. I made excellent experiences with "open notes" exams ...
A thousand time yes. I taught university calculus back in the neolithic when I was young and an ass. Were I to teach again, it would be open notes, open book, open whatever short of phone a friend. Otherwise all you test is the ability to regurgitate on demand. Many of our social/political problem come from regurgitation replacing thinking. I blame closed book/note exams for Trump.
There is a lot of knowledge floating around, mucho stuff from schools is either too basic, dated, or soon to be. New knowledge is being produced fast, keeping up with it and knowing where to get it is becoming more important than holding on to old facts. Every generation gets a new set of realities.
A degree shows you have the fortitude to gobble up shit and learn old stuff. Great!
so when we have implants that allow us to access all human knowledge, will college only be open to people who dont have them? will a higher education be denied to those who have higher de facto intelligence and memory, and will college degrees be denied, thus chance at a good job? maybe eventually ALL people will have implants, and college will be denied to all of them. i think we have a problem here.
Nothing they wrote is misspelled. Perhaps you meant a grammar-checker?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Why not let people cheat on exams? They're going to cheat their way through their work life afterwards anyway. Can't use the internet? Why not? Not like the internet is going anywhere afterwards.
"But the exam exists to test the rote memorization skills of people! They can't be allowed to cheat!" Why not? Can you remember everything you've ever read, or do you yourself look up material when you can't remember? Did the people who wrote the tests get every question from memory, or did they pour through books and references to find the least useful questions ever?
If Jimmy leaves USA on a spaceplane going 10,000 miles per hour, can an Oreo the size of Texas truly feed the starving people in Who Gives A Fuck?
A) Yes B) No C) Why isn't Jimmy a woman? Women can do everything men can do too and I think Jimmy should be a woman.
No, the point is that if anybody had bothered to teach those supposed adult college kids some basic facts (the dates of those events) or had the asshole college professor decided to use those actual facts, then he would not have been able to lead his students astray. But the teacher was able to teach falsehoods by using the mantra that "memorizing rote facts is useless" to not teach the facts that showed the lie of his concept.
I would hope that explaining how cause does not follow effect would be part of answering that test question. Usually this isn't something you have to explain very much, not at the college level anyway.
My point was that the teacher in question was using the "no facts" mantra to his advantage to teach bogus concepts. His students ate it up because they liked what they were hearing and they had already been taught that facts only get in the way of learning so they didn't bother looking for them.
Except you don't know what the alleged teacher did, let alone what they used, and none of us do either. You only read about it, but lack a source, so your ability to ascribe a method to it is hard to determine.
But you haven't even offered a source for what you read. This is why rote memorization isn't as important as a deeper understanding, and you've demonstrated it quite well. See you have presented to us a narrative account, but being just a random commentator on an internet board, there is no reason to give your story any particular credit. The AP, Reuters, they can be wrong, so why give you any weight?
You're just regurgitating a set of beliefs you have about something, that may not even have happened. That it fits your own preferred biases makes it even more suspect. How can I tell? By looking at your recent posting history to see what you've said before.
How can I look up your story? I can't. It's too vague. Not even a college or a time period. That it is what you allege to be a "prominent California university" which means a person like yourself would find that to fit your own preferred beliefs and eat it up. Quite hungrily. Or you'd just make it u, and expect nobody to ever challenge you.
Learning to memorize rote facts won't help in sussing out your bullshit, it takes a bit of understanding instead.
But if you want someone who did some work, try this book.
That's the difference in documentation and regurgitation.
You cannot do Laplace transforms on a normal scientific calculator. Even "symbolic" calculators only sometimes have Laplace transforms. The problem comes when you rely on one of those toys to find your inverse transform, and it can't. Typically a human has to realize, that, for example, the calculator can't do it because it would have to factor a high-degree polynomial, and that using a specialized routine would fix the problem.
Also, if you are solving problems where there is a general parameter, and you want solutions for all values of the parameter, you need a human mathematican.
Have everyone leave their electronics in their lockers on the day of the test. Then detonate a small EMP bomb in the middle of the class that will destroy any electronics that they may have snuck in with.
(insert trollface here)
I wonder about homonyms. People using the wrong one is a pretty big pet-peeve of mine (though mostly when that person already annoys me in some other way, people I don't know don't bother me when they do it wrong & if I suspect they're doing it on purpose, it doesn't bother me). If I mean "your" but I type "you're" didn't I still misspell "your"?* Yes, no (current) spell-checker (that I am aware of) can catch that, as the misspelling happens to be another word (and a grammar-checker likely would), but does that make it not a misspelling?
If my child in grammar school was being given a spelling test and the word was your, the teacher would give the word in a sentence. If she wrote "you're," the teacher would rightfully mark it wrong. I duhno, I suspect I am being overly pedantic (especially given what you were replying to was a reference to using a spell-checker and no spell-checker could do what they asserted it could) and maybe this is more of a philosophical question, but I figured you wouldn't mind wasting a few moments pondering it with me (or demonstrating why I was wrong, if I was).
*I had to look up my punctuation for this sentence; periods and commas go inside quotation marks at the end of a sentence but apparently exclamation marks and question marks only do when the punctuation goes with the quoted item. English is a weird language, but since it's the only (written) language I know (no written form of ASL), I figure I aught to use it as accurately as my brain allows (and I welcome corrections, save obvious typos).
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Call it "boss" button. We should not trivialize the word.
In my opinion, the fundamental problem is that we have an education system which creates huge incentives to cheat. One's test scores can determine whether college is affordable or not (or whether you will be in debt the rest of your life). Test scores can determine whether one is selected or rejected by one's preferred college. When one looks at the problem with respect to economics, the demand is ever increasing, but the supply, at least for the most preferred colleges and universities, is effectively flat. In essence, one's life and potential is reduced to a handful of numbers that seemingly determine one's future -- relying on one's abilities alone is for some too great a risk. I don't subscribe to the particular notion, but clearly some aspirations are made much more achievable by attending certain schools or encountering certain opportunities (e.g., jobs, gates, and joy all had unprecedented access to computers as teenagers, the beetles spent a year playing gigs every week in Hamburg). So when cheating reaches epidemic proportions, weak or absent morals are not solely to blame. The fact that so many find themselves in an environment where failure is too much to bear and where assessment mechanisms are designed first and foremost to be inexpensive explains much of the problem. Collegiate and professional athletics exhibit similar issues. In the end, when we create a system that incentivizes cheating, many of those that are honest and have true merit will be passed over, for in the cheating arms race, the clever cheater probably has the advantage.
My thinking is that a spell-checker won't find that but a grammar-checker might find it. I've been playing with 'After the Deadline' as of late. My grammar is far from perfect which is why I continually strive to improve it. I must say, you should have seen how poor it was prior to my acting on my desire to improve. In short, it was horrible.
I am not one to get upset about much. Things like grammar do not bother me unless it's really showing a lack of effort. We have one notably bad grammarian and I've actually (gently) prodded them to make improvements. They're not perfect, not by a long-shot, but they're certainly improving. Sometimes I prod under my own username but that's not frequent. I usually tick the box and post as an AC. It took some effort but they're now using a spell-checker.
I'd call them out but I am not that kind of person and it's probably obvious who he is. I try to give simple directions and mild correction and they actually are showing signs of improvement. I don't mind that, they're making an effort. I am also not perfect and do make more than my share of mistakes. I'm also not likely to value my posts a great deal so I don't always put as much effort into them as I could. I'm okay with that, it's about accepting certain standards for different things. Various behaviors are fine for various circumstances.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Various behaviors are fine for various circumstances.
Indeed, especially on /. where quite a few people know more languages than I do and oft use better English than my (mono-lingual) co-workers (the primary source of my pet-peeve triggers - actually, the worst quit a little while back; while he was a fine person, I do not miss his constant errors [not homonyms in this case, but verbal issues such as 'I and so-and-so' rather than 'so-and-so and I' and no amount of gentle or otherwise prodding had any affect - people for whom English is a second language should only receive encouragement, but people that claim written proficiency but are 'just lazy when speaking' should be taken out back and ... but I digress] :)).
/. ;)
BTW: Run-on, multi-nested sentences like the above are perfectly fine for
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
The course in question was at UC Berkely and Dinesh D'Souza wrote about it years ago. There was no test question. Please read with comprehension as the goal.
Because certain students were so enamored by the "no rote facts" mindset, they were easily led astray by one of their professors and when someone tried to point out the fallacy by using the facts (the actual dates), the students didn't want to listen because they were busy enjoying the concept and they didn't need any facts to do that. The whole point is that without facts as a basis it is far to easy to teach false concepts.
I'd get a bit frustrated with that. I find that people who are lazy in areas like that are also lazy in other areas in life. I don't really have high standards for people and I've only got one really big pet peeve for in-person contact. I'm pretty sure it's a form of insanity called 'mesophonia' or something like that.
I can not stand someone eating with their mouth open, talking with their mouth full, or eating noisily. I *will* say something - even if you're at a different table and I'm in the restaurant. I did not go out to eat to dine with pigs. I don't care what fork you use. I do not want to hear slurping, chomping, loud crunching, etc... I do not go to places where they would eat like that. I've had people thank me (including applause) for my behavior and I've never been kicked out. I have had someone threaten to take me outside and I led the way. He paid his check and left with his family in a huff.
I don't know what it is and, try like I might, I can't get over it. It has prevented me from enjoying parts of life. It has prevented me from doing out and doing certain things. I know this. I will break someone's jaw if provoked once my dander gets up. I have no idea what it is and, try as I might, I can't get over it. I simply avoid areas where that's a likely problem. I'll position myself where I neither see nor hear. Sometimes I can cope but it is not easy. Other times, I'll get up and leave or, if egregious enough, I'll intercede. There is no stopping me once I get going. I did spend eight years in the Marines and took each and every single level of MCT - all the way through the advanced levels and then the various training levels specific with my MOS.
Not even raw boots on the Island ate like some of those people do. I can not and will not stand it. If particularly peeved and sufficiently motivated, I will not be the one leaving. Well, unless the staff asks me to leave - so far, so good. And no, I've even spoken with a shrink about it and I'm told I'm sane but they pointed out the mental illness at the same time - so they might have just been polite. I dunno. It's going to end up with me in jail at some point. Strangely? I'm okay with that.
You can probably hit me and I'll walk away and say nothing. You can do a whole lot of things and I'll do nothing. Then, there's that one thing... I snap like a patient fresh out of the State Mental Hospital.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
In light of smart shirts, electronics imbedded in clothing, etc., students will take exams completely naked, in little booths separated from the outside world, except for the instructions, test sheet, answer sheet, scratch-pad, no. 2 pencil, eraser, a calculator (provided if needed,) and a call-button for when the exam is complete, that takes the exam materials away, then opens the door. When the door is opened, the test is complete and submitted for grading.
Simple, problems solved.
Remember kids: if you don't like this, thank all your fellow kids who COULDN'T STOP FUCKING CHEATING, the little piles of DOG SHIT are responsible for this. You studied, they didn't, but somehow they want the same scores as those of us who actually studied while they were out getting drunk and high or playing games and shit. Fuck those assholes. We work, we study, we should get the reward, not those lazy goddamned, good-for-nothing pieces of dogshit!
Who's with me on this?!?
You are never going to beat technology, in a handful of years youll get students have that have AR overlays implanted on their eyes, you are not going to beat this kind of cheating
The problem is that the testing method using today is too easy to cheat, instead of trying to do the impossible how about designing tests to be more practical making the students apply their knowledge instead of having them parrot information that can be easily written down on a paper.
The whole written test thing is pointless in many subjects, if you are in an embedded processors class, have the students use a test rig to do something, if you are in a chemistry class have the students repeat an experiment, i understand that in the most basic level you have to test basic knowledge but if you try a little bit you can find a better test than "parrot those 10 formulas you have seen in class to the paper again"
I have seen so many students with memory so perfect they could rival Sherlock Holmes but when its time to actually use that information to deduce an equation, explain something or compose a complex answer they turn into drooling mutes
Well, you've at least made a claim about a person saying it, but that same concept you complain about could apply to Dinesh D'Souza.
That's why he thought an old picture that featured Hillary Clinton with a Confederate flag behind her was legitimate. He was led astray by his own beliefs.
So a non-supported, narrative account, that he contends is true? Well, ok, but we're even a further remove from that, since it's just what you want us to believe about it.
What I'd be surprised would about would be is if Dinesh D'Souza pointed out some lies that went against HIS preferred notions. Or if you did.
But that requires more than a rote memorization of facts, doesn't it?