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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.
"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.
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
Signal Jammers are all the way illegal in the US.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.'"
I wonder how true this is.
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?
It is in effect from 0500 to 0800,
That is GMT, which was 8-11am local time according to TFA, so the rest of your post is BS.
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.
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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.
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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.
In a country where disabling the internet in it's entirety is the only tool to prevent exam cheating, i am sure they can use jammers without legal consequenses.
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.
It's also a LOT more expensive to deploy than just shutting down the internet - which has zero capital cost.
Who cares about just the capital cost? You seem to be assuming that Iraq has zero Internet-based economy.
Given the precarious conditions, I can only assume that they figure turning off the internet won't have that great an economic impact.
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
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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,
Given it's a Big Test, it probably follows like other Big Tests you see, like the ones in Asia (where cheating Is basically an art).
Effectively, it's the One Big Test That Determines Your Future (And If You Still Have Parents). The results of the test determine if you're going to Overseas University with Scholarship, Local University, Trade School, not going at all. Parents have disowned kids who don't make it to overseas university, and if your parents are rich enough and don't really care about the test results, they can pay your way through overseas university as well.
The pressure is so immense that there is a distinct increase in teenaged suicides, and well, the incentive to cheat is quite up there. So creative types invent all sorts of cheat equipment - from hidden radios and ear pieces through to hidden storage devices with displays.
And if you think shutting down the internet for a few hours is bad, a few places have requested that people stop what they're doing for those hours - even banning traffic to give the students quiet to do the exams.
The real solution is better proctoring, do they have a proctor shortage in Iraq?
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