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Rich Kids Are Cheating in School With Apple Watches (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: There is, however, one demographic that has embraced the Apple Watch with open arms: tech-savvy, upper middle-class teens and tweens. The watch is a convenient workaround for classroom cell-phone bans; it can be used for everything from texting to cheating on tests. [...] Julia Rubin, a former middle-school teacher at a private school in New York City, said that when the Apple Watch first came out in 2014, a handful of students got them as presents for the holidays.
When Rubin asked her school's principal to ban the watches the same way the school banned cell phones, she refused. In addition to kids texting during class, there is growing concern that smart watches could be used to help kids cheat during exams. In fact, there is a wealth of YouTube videos showing teens how to do precisely that, usually with the disclaimer that they are only sharing this information "for entertainment purposes."
[...] Nikias Molina, 20, is a Spanish vlogger who runs the YouTube channel Apple World. A slender, dark-haired kid with braces and a slight European accent, Molina posted a 2018 video showing subscribers how to use various apps on the Apple Watch to cheat on exams. As he demonstrates in the video and explained to me, there are apps you can download onto the Apple Watch to save PDFs, but the most common method is to take a photo of a cheat sheet and pull it up on the Apple Watch, which doesn't require internet accessibility. The response to the video was mixed -- "students were thanking me [in the comments], and teachers were hating on me" -- but the video racked up more than 115,000 views.
When Rubin asked her school's principal to ban the watches the same way the school banned cell phones, she refused. In addition to kids texting during class, there is growing concern that smart watches could be used to help kids cheat during exams. In fact, there is a wealth of YouTube videos showing teens how to do precisely that, usually with the disclaimer that they are only sharing this information "for entertainment purposes."
[...] Nikias Molina, 20, is a Spanish vlogger who runs the YouTube channel Apple World. A slender, dark-haired kid with braces and a slight European accent, Molina posted a 2018 video showing subscribers how to use various apps on the Apple Watch to cheat on exams. As he demonstrates in the video and explained to me, there are apps you can download onto the Apple Watch to save PDFs, but the most common method is to take a photo of a cheat sheet and pull it up on the Apple Watch, which doesn't require internet accessibility. The response to the video was mixed -- "students were thanking me [in the comments], and teachers were hating on me" -- but the video racked up more than 115,000 views.
Came here for this. The title is certainly a little click bait with the inference that a several hundred dollar watch separates the rich from the poor. I am very wealthy and have a 120 dollar casio solar radio controlled watch, and I know many people who make much less than I do with the latest iDoodad. I waste my money on plenty of other things so as not to be critical of choices, but to conclude that you can evaluate the socioeconomic class of a person based on a watch they are wear is ridiculous. Now if is a limited issue swiss watch from the Bern exhibits in the 400K price range, well then maybe, but even then those are all mechanical and you couldn't use them very easily to cheat.
Also if it is such an issue, how about just making students remove their watch during exams. That doesn't seem like a very complicated solution. Or even better make them put their phone and watch on a table up in the front of the class. When I was in medical school you had to leave your phone up front and it had to be powered off during the test, if it rang or made noise you would fail the exam (probably more compliance than people on airplanes using airplane mode). In 4 years of medical school I never heard 1 phone go off, that's pretty impressive.
I also agree with the commentor below. If you are writing a good exam, there isn't much you could fit on an easily accessible cheat sheet that would be useful at all. I have seen a couple of Youtube videos of people showing you how to put small pieces of paper with formula written on them inside a click-pen so you can scroll through a few formula, maybe I just don't remember being in 7th grade, but if you have taken the time to write something out that is so brief you probably have it memorized already. In one example they had written a few of the trig identities as an example, but if you know sin^2+cos^2=1 you can just divide though by whatever function you want there really is literally no reason to cheat. You want sec just divide by cos^2 to get tan^2 + 1 = sec^2. But in today's education system so much is put on memorization and not enough is put on actually understanding what you are doing.
Take the Advanced Placement exams, from the college board. These are college level exams where you have all the knowledge in front of you, and you need to understand the application to get a high score. However, the test is ultimately measuring your ability to fill in the correct bubble so any rational person, if they can, is simply going to get a list of correct answer choices and fill them in. Yes, many tests have a written section so you must know something, but on many AP tests the written section is not the limiting factor.
if you are not interested in rank and file, but knowledge, then there are a number of innovated ways that one can ask questions in a computer based exam that both give an somewhat individualized test to each student and can be graded automatically. The student can be given all the content, and can even be allowed to 'cheat' to find other content, but the cheating is not free. I costs time and points as the students will not be able to complete as many questions as the student that is familiar with the subject.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Except that teachers often are told that they can't assess like that, because students need a clear-cut answer. Because subjectively grading that might lead to bias, and it would be better to have a multiple choice test with well defined answers so that nobody can complain about unfair grading.
If we could let teachers be professionals and hold them to high standards, without parental or student interference, that would really help. Unfortunately, we don't pay most public school teachers enough to get great ones, and a lot of administrators (and teachers themselves) aren't interested in fighting asshole parents who often are looking for As for their kid and are seeking any way to manipulate the system to get them.
If your kid fails a multiple choice test, the best you can do is argue that the question was vague or the answer options were wrong. Both are fairly easy to counter-argue. If your kid fails a 1 hr essay on why the Maginot line was ineffective, you can attack that from all sorts of angles including bias on the part of the teacher, and them asking kids for something that doesn't have a well-defined answer. And parents (at least in the US) are insane enough that some will throw fits in the school or district office, and show up at school board meetings to shit on a teacher who didn't give their kid an A. And who will sue everyone even tangentially involved.
This leads schools to dissuade this sort of very good exam writing in favor of cut-and-dried shit that would easily stand up in court. Yet another fantastic knock-on effect of the US legal system!
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