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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?
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.
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.
Totally correct. I got somebody else to do my exams in med school, and only a few of my patients have died this week. And it's not my fault - they were already pretty ill or they wouldn't have gone to hospital in the first place.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
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".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
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."
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 ]
'Your Fired'
Maybe getting the English teacher fired wasn't such a great idea...
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I had a Dumbwatch, I flunked all my exams.
Table-ized A.I.
I think you hugely underestimate how motivated people are to cheat and the lengths they will go to to get ahead.
Everything up to actually studying apparently.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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