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.

Comments

Don't understand

[ceoyoyo]

What's the difference between pulling up a cheat sheet on your watch and having one stuck in your sock? I suppose you could keep more material on your watch, but as everyone who's ever written an open book test knows, more material is a curse, not a blessing.

If you see a kid fiddling with their smart watch during a test, fail them. Can't do that? THAT's your problem, not the watch.

Re:Social Justice Warriors

[bagboy]

I'll go one further. "Rich kids" because they have an Apple Watch? Really? Now the definition between "rich" and "poor" is based on a $349 device?

Bad exam design ...

[b0s0z0ku]

Design the exams like university level exams, where a cheat (equation) sheet is allowed, but you actually need to understand the material to finish the exam in time. regurgitation based exams are stupid.

Re:Bad exam design ...

[fermion]

Fundamentally the issue here is not that students are cheating, but that tests are designed the same way there were 50 years ago, and are measuring the same kind of useless knowledge that lead to the problems we have in the 1970's.

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.

Re:Bad exam design ...

[gweihir]

In my current exams, I let the students use all lecture slides and their own notes and their own summary of the lecture. Does not have any impact on results, but the students learn more because they revise the material better this way. One student even commented in the eval that he expected the lecture summary he did to be quite useful in the future. We are in the information age, even if many teachers and lecturers have not realized that. Restricting access to information too much, giving too little time, etc. are just very bad ways to increase exam difficulty. They are easy to do though, so they are a favorite of intellectually lazy teachers.

Re:Bad exam design ...

[apoc.famine]

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!

Re:Thats alright

[MightyYar]

Aluminum is nothing compared to Wifi waves and GMOs! Fortunately Himalayan salt candles and kombucha can mitigate the effects when used rectally.

"European" accent?

[YuppieScum]

Really? A "European" accent?

Can they mean "speaks Spanish like a Spaniard rather than a Mexican/Puerto Rican/American/etc," or "speaks English with a Spanish, rather than Mexican/etc accent."

Or perhaps it means they are unable to distinguish between the accents of the Spanish, Greeks, Italians, French, Germans, Poles, Finns, Swedes or British, let alone the regions thereof? (other European countries are available)

Whatever they mean, it adds nothing to the actual story and serves only to demonstrate the laziness and ignorance of this "journalist," and the ineptitude of the editorial oversight processes of this "publication."

Sorry, but this sort of thing really pisses me off - if copy like this came across my desk (OK, so it wouldn't actually, but you know what I mean), words would be had... probably starting with "bollocks."

You're assuming the purpose is journalism

[Solandri]

You're assuming the purpose of TFA is investigative journalism. To bring an important issue to the public's attention.

It's not. The purpose is to generate more page loads and thus more advertising revenue. So if inflammatory insinuations - like singling out kids who wear an Apple Watch, or speak with a "Europeant" accent - gets you all in a huff to where you click on TFA, then it's done its job. It's one of the reasons I'm not that critical of comments here from people who haven't read TFA. So many of articles are click-bait that I won't fault someone for using a too-stringent anti-click-bait filter and not reading TFA.