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."

Comments

Ok, so...

[mrsam]

... 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?

Re:Ok, so...

[khasim]

Nope. Looks like you got it. Even from the summary:

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."

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.

Re:Ok, so...

[SumDog]

That was in that move Paper Planes ...in reality, parents would lose their collective shift if a teach went around taking up everyone $200 ~ $500 smartphones.

Re:Ok, so...

[thegarbz]

This solution seems too obvious.

Yes the solution is obvious. How about not judging people on the ability to remember useless facts in a 90 minute window of opportunity under conditions they will never experience in real life, and then giving them a mark that will affect them in real life.

I've been in industry for 20 years now. No one has asked me to perform long division on paper. No one has asked me to solve a laplace transform without a calculator. No one has asked me to sit in silence for 20 minutes reciting things from memory. No one has forced me to solve some kind of hard problem without the ability to go get some reference material.

All of that is quite good since I really didn't perform well on exams, and found myself lucky to be at a university and do courses where you're merits are determined on work output rather than rote memorisation and a 90minute stress test.

Re:Ok, so...

[tnk1]

This solution seems too obvious.

No one has asked me to sit in silence for 20 minutes reciting things from memory. No one has forced me to solve some kind of hard problem without the ability to go get some reference material.

You got off pretty easily in your interviews, I guess. Every third interview, I get some dipshit who thinks that they need to have me write code under a time deadline without reference materials or adequate tools. I get it, there are some geniuses out there who can do that. And I can't blame them for wanting to hire such people, but I'd consider that to be an escalation challenge, not the first question.

Mind you, I can pull it off sometimes. I always was good at test taking. What I hate is that people actually use that method and waste people's time. It's a weed out method, and a bad one at that. I've never worked with someone who needs to win a speed coding contest to do their job.

Re:Ok, so...

[Radish03]

There are hearing aids that support bluetooth streaming because you can't use headphones while wearing them. Those spring to mind as an example of a legitmate medical equipment that could also have nefarious uses.

Re:Ok, so...

[dgatwood]

No, the best method is an exam with all essay questions or, for science/math, all questions that require you to apply your knowledge. If a watch helps you cheat in any meaningful way, that means the exam is based on pure rote memorization of facts, which pretty much means you've missed the entire point of teaching the material in the first place.

Well written exams...

[VAXcat]

If it's a well written exam, access to 8GB of cheating info wouldn't help...

Exams should be open-book anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Exams should be open-book anyway

[paulpach]

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.

I would agree 100% with you if we are talking about math, programming, physics, etc... On these subjects I am all for open book tests.

But if you are talking about history or anatomy, well, the entire subject is about memorization.

Re:Exams should be open-book anyway

[idontgno]

But if you are talking about history or anatomy, well, the entire subject is about memorization.

Well, you forget that as this is Slashdot, the basement-dwelling shoe-gazing trogs don't think those subjects should be taught or tested either, because TECHNOLOGY!.

It's about learning to think

[sjbe]

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.

Re:It's about learning to think

[Obfuscant]

But if they had simply handed you a calculator with it programmed in then you would never have learned it in the first place.

This. And you would not have learned when it was appropriate to use and when it was not. I have two examples to make this point.

The first was when I was a TA and a student asked to borrow my calculator for a quiz. I told him it was an HP and asked if he knew how to use it. Sure, he said. So I loaned it to him. One of the answers he turned in was "1.00". This was for the concentration of hydrogen ions in a buffer solution of a weak acid. At some point he had pressed "number enter number enter divide", adding an extra "enter" and thus dividing the second number by itself. This is a common error, and meant nothing, really. But here's the problem: his answer showed me that he knew the equations but had no grasp on the concept of "weak acid" or "buffer solution", or of pH in general, since his answer was about six orders of magnitude wrong.

Several years earlier I had been a student in the same class. We had a quiz problem about pKa and ... hydrogen ion concentrations in buffer solutions. There are two different equations you can use to solve this. One is short, simple, and requires an approximation. The other is longer, more complicated, and doesn't. If you just hand someone both equations, you can guess they'll pick the easier one because it's easier, but they'll never learn about the assumption it requires and they'll get the wrong answer. Every time. This tendency to pick the shorter one is so strong that the TA had automatically used the wrong equation when creating the quiz key and he marked my answer, using the long form, wrong. And then I got to point out that the assumption was invalid and my answer was, indeed, the correct one.

Tests to determine mastery of concepts aren't always testing things you're going to do in a direct way in adult life. And even for long division, yes, there have been times when I want to figure something out and don't have a calculator at hand to do the division. I consider the lack of ability of the common person to do simple math like this to be one of the losses of civilization. Even just having to fumble for a calculator when you want to split a check three ways -- that's ridiculous.

If every problem you solve has a reference available for it then you are doing nothing but solving trivial problems.

Not necessarily, but he's going to waste an awful lot of time having to look things up while other people remember stuff and can synthesize new and better things without spending days looking all the details up. His more productive co-workers will get the raises; he'll get to visit the technical library. Yes, I love the fact I can pull out the Perl Quick Reference to refresh myself on perl commands, but it sure does make writing the code a lot slower. And when I learned 68000 assembly language, I got a lot more productive at it as I memorized what the instructions did and didn't have to look up every one every time.

Re:Write better exams

[gweihir]

Indeed. I made excellent experiences with "open notes" exams as the lecturer of an EE course over several years. (That was the first time I was the primary examiner and could do that.) For one, students take better notes and ask questions during the lecture if things are unclear. And you can ask more difficult things, which makes the exams better overall. I also got very positive feedback from students, saying that while things did not get easier, they understood more and generally felt the course was more worthwhile taking as they could focus on understanding things and not on remembering them. And while you have to ask new questions every time, I did not find that difficult or hard to do.

Personally, I will only do "open notes" in the future whenever the decision is up to me and, if the lecture is based on a book, "open book".

The solution

[HuguesT]

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.

Re:deja vu

[Ambassador Kosh]

Instead rewrite the test so that aids like this don't help.

Make the test assuming students have access to pretty much all information and make the test about actual understanding of the material. If a test can be trivialized due to cheating it is a bad test to begin with.

The math test sounds like an example of a good test, same for my engineering exams. 95% or so of the points where for defining all the equations, knowns, unknowns, make sure there where enough equations for all the unknowns, showing the understanding of the problem etc. and 5% was for actually solving the problem. As it stands today humans define problems, computers solve them and humans interpret the results and make sure they are sane.

I have encountered so many students from a calculus class that could solve a math problem if given to them in the notation used in the class but given a word problem where they had to define the actual equation and then evaluate if the answer was reasonable they where completely lost. In real life you have to define the equation yourself and also figure out if the answer is reasonable and schools almost never teach that part and memorization does NOT help with those problems.