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Iraq Shuts Down Internet In Entire Country To Prevent Exam Cheating (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Iraqi government has ordered ISPs to shut down Internet access in the entire country to prevent exam cheating for Iraq's official exams for secondary and high schools. This is the second year in a row when Iraq does this, after the same thing happened in 2015. Companies like Akamai and Dyn also noted the government's poor decision on Twitter. It appears that Iraqi officials never heard of signal jammers and video cameras to combat exam cheating. The country's Internet went dark May 14-16th, between 05:00 AM and 08:00 AM GMT. An Iraqi ISP leaked on Facebook the content of an email it received from state officials.
Iraqi officials never heard of signal jammers and video cameras
I've been out of school for 20 years now. Are these countermeasures a normal fixture in American schools now?
We should probably do this (but for a shorter time and ISP by ISP) to help guarantee no critical services are dependent a single internet connection. The internet is vulnerable to lots of failure modes, and generally critical systems shouldn't be crippled by losing access, or at the very least should have a redundant connection.
Too soon?
"It appears that Iraqi officials never heard of signal jammers and video cameras to combat exam cheating."
Seems easier to just turn off the internet than to send signal jammers to every school and ensure they are being used, and cover the correct frequencies.
I'm sure they've heard of those technologies. I'm sure they use them.
I'm also pretty certain they don't have the resources to equip every school with signal jammers and cameras - and staff to operate them. This is the cheap option.
How cheap it is compared to the business and productivity lost is unknown : )
Reminiscent of the arguments for putting pollution filtering on fossil fuel burning power plants vs. capturing pollution from every individual personal motor vehicle.
Wouldn't it be simpler just to make the examination hall a technology free zone?
How cheap it is compared to the business and productivity lost is unknown : )
Lost? I'm sure a lot of businesses had increased productivity that morning.
Get back to work and stop wasting time on Slashdot.
Love,
quenda's boss.
Reminiscent of the arguments for putting pollution filtering on fossil fuel burning power plants vs. capturing pollution from every individual personal motor vehicle.
Not really. The cost of pollution controls on cars can be easily passed on to consumers because it is a tangible part on the automobile. On a power plant it will have to be factored into existing operational costs and how to divvy these up to the consumers (by usage, flat rate, additional incidental charge,etc).
You can't charge students taking a test for the camera pointing at them.
They should use the Seattle solution. Make the Internet access so slow you can't get enough answers to greatly change your score.
Thats not too extreme or anything
In unrelated news, Iraqi student grades increased for three days in a row.
Therefore, only those who could afford a mobile device with a cache of wikipedia could cheat...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This measure is to prevent LEAKING exams (by corrupt officials or staff), not cheating during exams. It is in effect from 0500 to 0800, the period during which examination papers are being transported to examination areas.
Of course it is a stupid decision but that's for another post.
Is it really that easy to block access entirely? Are there any stories of people that found a way around the damage?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why not open book?
This is the cheap option.
The cheap option is to make sure the exam invigilator is not asleep and have strict rules of what devices are allowed in exams i.e. ones with zero remote communication abilities. It's not hard to do.
It would ruin China and India TOEFL and SAT scores.
I have never seen a terrorist write Akbar with a c.
>>It appears that Iraqi officials never heard of signal jammers and video cameras to combat exam cheating.
they have heard all of those. but have you ever heard of, no money to buy any of those?
Ah, the smell of western arrogance in the morning. Of course if some brown people decide something, it must be stupid.
Or it could simply be that they decided to not engage in an arms race with students, to take no chances (seems these exams are really important to them) and to make sure.
And it's not like the USA wouldn't be known for the same kind of knee-jerk reaction. Like when all air travel was shut down for a week following 9/11. Because... uh, because of what? Anyone seriously thought there were more terrorists lined up for the next day?
Not that I support this shutdown, there's got to be a better way, but to simply assume they're stupid monkey who have not heard of this or that other, incomplete solution is just pure arrogance.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
they cannot trust the staff.
but this just gives the staff the right to print money basically.
But on the other side, consider the productivity cost of having the wrong test scores assigned to kids. While test scores are far from perfect, that kind of wholesale inaccuracy can impact productivity for a generation.
Real lawyers write in C++
Are the Iraqi's seriously shutting down .iq to improve school exams?
Basically they touch the ground to see what would be consequences of cutting off Internetz for whole population for extended periods of time. Perhaps for ever.
There was an entire cell of terrorists that did.
"This is the cheap option."
Compared to just forbidding any kind of electronic device in an exam room? If you knew your precious smart watch, ipad, etc would be taken away permanently if you bring it into an exam room I think you'd think twice about bringing it in to begin with.
But then back in my day we weren't even allowed to bring in a calculator.
What did cheaters do before the internet?
It's far more effective to get kids to arrive in uniform; leave their school bags and phones/tablets/smartwatches outside and have good spacing between tables and a person present in the classroom to monitor activities.
Do the old school teacher trick and leave the room for a bit. Often you'll see desperate cheaters frantically checking to see if you've gone far and what the brightest students notes are. Cheating children are easily caught.
If you have a budget for it a security camera can help. You can always view the tape later for suspicious activities of under performing kids achieving suspiciously high marks. Hopefully it's through merit, hard work and dedication.
If they bothered to make every major region have a different exam data set and every kid gets a multi-page exam in a different order then mass scale cheating would become rather complicated.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
I have never seen a terrorist write Akbar with a c.
Then he's probably not a terrorist if he doesn't know the correct spelling?
Since you do know the correct spelling, are you a terrorist?
Note: If you are in or work for the US government, the answer is yes, you *are* a member of the worlds' largest and deadliest terrorist organization, though not Islamic in nature.
I can't help but think that Iran conferred with Trump before implementing this idea.
Given the precarious conditions, I can only assume that they figure turning off the internet won't have that great an economic impact.
What is that then? There are more than a billion terr..err.muslolims... what bigger group of kil..err..peacefulpeoplewhowontkillyouforinsultingtheirimaginaryfriendinthesky do you know of?
How cheap it is compared to the business and productivity lost is unknown : )
Multiply the number of Iraqi's who read slash dot by their hourly rate and the number of hours the internet was down. That's how much money was saved :D
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
You can't charge students taking a test for the camera pointing at them.
Sure they can. I've taken tests at testing centers where they did exactly that. What do you think those test fees are for? They just divide up the cost of operating the camera among the number of people taking the test. It's trivial to do that. I'm an accountant and in cost accounting we do stuff like this all the time. It's called cost allocation. Some costs are easy to attribute to a specific activity. Others aren't so easy but ultimately you have to allocate all the costs somehow and there is usually a rational way to do it. Allocating the cost of operating a camera is relatively easy.
But the Ieaqi government doesn't control the entire country.
What about ISIS, or the Kurds,
Aside from the remote users sitting on the helpdesk line. "Yeah, my VPN client won't connect, and Jeff says the tunnels to all the satellite pump stations are down. We're not going to be able to move any oil to the port today."
The real solution is better proctoring, do they have a proctor shortage in Iraq?
crazy dynamite monkey
Considering what I've seen of the "foreign aid invasion" students we need to be addressing that issue right here. Just had two Indian students ejected from my CS Masters program because they not only plagiarized a research paper two people in the same class plagiarized the same paper! These two got caught but I see it all the time in foreign students. Education is only a secondary objective. They mostly just want the degree so they can move on to the more advanced degrees that offer teaching positions, often for Professors of the same foreign origin, where they can get an MS or PhD with little effort where US students would even never be considered. Just love this open borders stuff. Wonder how many American students are getting PhDs in India a China this year. Much less at the expense of their respective governments. Lol! Image China paying for an American to get a PhD in CS or Electrical engineering in Beijing. Bahahahahaha!!
Highly recommend to the native born American college profs out there, give the white males a break. Nobody gets more consideration than the minority and foreign students and (despite some of them being VERY poor students) they're over running everyone else by an order of magnitude on a playing field that's about as fair as Obama's justice department. Fight back now or you'll soon have no colleges that aren't owned and operated by, essentially, second rate academics that hate America and Americans....
Allah is PISSED!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.