The Independent Commission on Examination Malpractice in the UK has recommended that all watches be banned from exam rooms, basically because it’s becoming very difficult to tell regular watches from smart watches.
JonKnowsNothing • September 13, 2019 9:22 AM
Don’t forget about Google Glasses ’cause the GlassH*Les are on the way back to market.
Those and other semi-bio-implants are gonna cause some havoc too. Once you get your enhanced seeing and hearing device with auto-connect on every spectrum, the doors to University are gonna fly off their hinges.
You might not have your SIRI “on” but the proctors are likely to have them enabled ’cause who doesn’t want to talk to an inert device pretending to be human by actually sending the conversations to humans who pretend to be computers.
Even if you might not be able to tap into one of these close proximity devices, there will be the ones enabled in all buildings by their owners. You just cannot live without it!
There is also the recourse to cash that now vanishing material. The ban on cash isn’t working that well either.
Last they are gonna have to scan for DNA ’cause if any of your ancestors attended the preferred list of choices, well.. Bob’s Your Uncle there.
It sort of might be better to scrap the entire For Profit Testing Systems that shows nothing of importance and are simply gating mechanisms.
Just do what the US Military did during the Viet Nam work to stop the Anti-War movement: Go for a Lottery System. Once some folks got numbers off the spectrum they didn’t give a F about the folks with the first lots and the anti-war movement collapsed. The lack of facing imminent death had the desired impact.
So roll out a Lottery System. Works much better. Cheaper. You get TV air time. Less hassles and the results actually might be better. They certainly won’t be much worse.
Cigaes • September 13, 2019 10:07 AM
At some point, we will have to consider the use of stingrays around exam centers. If I am not mistaken, they can detect the location of the phones with good accuracy, so they should be able to filter people inside the exam center, not on an approved list and not calling emergency numbers. I think that would be a perfectly acceptable use of that technology.
It does not solve the problem of cheating using the offline data on a smart device, but communication is the biggest fraud issue. Cheating with dumb data can be mitigated by adapting the questions.
Don Kenney • September 13, 2019 10:49 AM
Digital cheating on examinations is indeed going to be problem, but I doubt that smart watches are a very suitable vehicle for such bad behavior. My guess would be that anyone chatting with his/her wristwatch or tapping frantically on it would be suspected of transgressing. But there will almost certainly be better cheating tools in the future. In the long run the choice may come down to a lot of probably erratic and bad tempered technology or a lot of open book tests. My preference would be the latter, so we’ll probably get the former.
Adrian • September 13, 2019 11:16 AM
People have been cheating on tests with “dumb” watches for a long time.
The old Casios had four buttons, one in each corner. If you removed the guts, you could insert a small scroll with notes. The “buttons” become wheels to scroll your notes past the display window.
Ear buds, too. In the 1980s, a friend of mine recorded all of the Spanish vocabulary words we were supposed to have memorized for a quiz. When the (substitute) teacher questioned him about his Walkman during the quiz, he said it was a hearing aid. The teacher said hearing aids were much smaller. My friend said the small ones were very expensive and his family was poor. Several other students immediately picked up on the scheme and called out the teacher for what today we might call “poor-shaming.” The teacher then apologized.
Ross Snider • September 13, 2019 3:36 PM
The better way to do this is to design tests with the assumption that the test taker will have access to the internet and their friends and textbook. Design the test so that you have to really know what you’re doing to pass it, and having the internet, a cheat sheet, or smart friends isn’t going to help you.
This is what my some of my best professors did. People who cheated avoided their classes. People who took their classes were judged (much more accurately) on actually mastery of the material.
JonKnowsNothing • September 14, 2019 2:22 AM
@Ross Snider
The better way to do this is to design tests with the assumption that the test taker will have access to the internet and their friends and textbook.
In the ancient days of non-electric education, I also had professors that preferred you to know WHERE to find the information rather than ROTE memory answers.
There’s a new twist on this though, because people ask answers of Google, SIRI etc because they don’t know the answers much less what those answers mean. They may get a canned answer from Alexa or best case some human has to step in and figure out the answer to 42.
Recently I read an article about someone trying to go Google-Free and they couldn’t. They couldn’t find their own home without the GPS map. They didn’t know how to buy in a real store for real money. They couldn’t buy a book or find the library much less use it (the destructions of card catalogs). It was pathetic really.
In the article one of the basic questions was “Before Google how DID anyone know X?” The answer was “You asked someone and hoped they knew the answer”.
Not only do folks not know how to answer anything without Google, they no longer even know where to go to find out how to find an answer. If it isn’t drip fed electronically they just do not know.
It’s not going to be about cheating so much but about who can program enough text replacement phrases to plug in an answer. Maybe that counts, but if they don’t even understand what the phrases mean, of what value is it?
YOLO
Winter • September 15, 2019 7:57 AM
As was written above, go for the “Open Book” exams (you may keep your textbooks). These are much more realistic tests for mastery of a subject than anything else.
Also, run any questions through the major search engines and keep the answers. Anyone coming up with such answers as are returned by these search engines is in for a questioning.
However, the current trend is that a teacher deposits all questions with the answer sheets beforehand, in the name of “objectivity”.
That scheme will be killed by technological development.
JonKnowsNothing • September 15, 2019 10:42 PM
@Winter
run any questions through the major search engines and keep the answers. Anyone coming up with such answers as are returned by these search engines is in for a questioning.
I am pretty sure this is already done. Nearly every possible variation on “cliff notes” essays plus purchased essays either from companies or even other students are run through some sort of check system.
A possible side effect of pre-vetting is “trending scores” will alter. If you pre-search a topic there is a bump in their trending score making it more likely to be at the top of the list.
Except where that search term/word is paid to remain below the first pages. There are a lot of these actually but few people notice because they rarely go to page 99+ on a query and never notice something “important” is found on page 2,999. These can be paid drops or political drops in scoring.
There is also in place surveillance techniques to see a student browsing history.
Folks in all sorts of testing environments can get “caught”, not just students fudging exam answers. There’s also the Bump-Downs in scores such as the Admissions Exam to Medical Schools in Japan that happened if you were the “wrong gender” and done by the Administrators of a number of the Top Medical Schools. Reported to have gone on for a decade or more.
If you have enough money you can just buy a degree and skip the whole charade.
Nicl • September 16, 2019 4:22 AM
Cheating is rampant in our society because there’s a financial incentive to do so. Test admin have been corrupted by money in the past. This is also evident in our governments where stunts like pay to play is common practice even among the self-proclaimed champions of democracy.
Peter A. • September 16, 2019 8:40 AM
Technology and students’ invention will provide more and more ways of cheating, harder and harder to detect.
A few cases from my student times…
Once a lecture was moved to another hall, normally used by another department. The halls were equipped with raising rows of seats in front of long room-wide desks. The backrests of row N obscured the view of what’s below the desk of row N+1. Sitting there I felt something strange under the desk. Intrigued, I dived down – a loop of fishing line was strung along all the length of the desk on plastic rollers, with alligator clips attached. It moved very smoothly – cable-railway for horizontal transport of handwritten notes…
A conspiracy at physics exam: one student had a small FM transmitter under his shirt with a microphone up his sleeve and was murmuring solutions into it (ess equals ah tee squared divided by two… etc.) and some others had pocket radios tuned in and earbud headphones (some reportedly grew a bit longer hair just for the exam).
One algebra professor was notorious for destroying elaborated sitting setups devised for easier information relay. “Gentlemen, let’s transpose this matrix!” or “Row 3 and 7, column 5 and 11, please switch places.” 😉
A conspiracy/hacking in high school: the physics teacher created a program (on a ZX Spectrum) for testing, and a set of tests. Quite clever design it had, I would say. To save time during lessons, instead of grilling some poor pupil at the blackboard, he made the pupil solve a test assignment at the computer, while he continued with the lesson. I had hacked the prog (blush) so it reacted to a nonstandard key combination and jump to the right answer, and obscured the code in the BASIC program listing by artificially adding enough backspaces. I just said to classmates: use it sparingly. It was never detected before my graduation…
All this in a country with much less (then, at least, it got a bit better since) school/academic ethics that is traditional for English-speaking world.
The true solution is, as said here before, open book exams. I have had a few (one quite recently, for an industry cert) and they are the best in my opinion. Test true knowledge and analytic skills, and information finding skills, not just the ability to hammer in textbook definitions.
Sometimes, two-phase exams (written/oral) are a good tool. My physics professor at the university had a habit of asking much more “tricky” questions of those students that scored A or B on the written part – often landing them at D or worse. Standard advice from higher-course colleagues: unless you’re really confident with your knowledge, strive for C on written and have it done. 😛
Theo • September 16, 2019 3:53 PM
“Open book” and “open internet” are two different things. The internet allows communication, you can effectively pay somebody to take an “open internet” test for you.
Being able to buy a few hours of expert time to take a test does not mean you will be able to buy a thousand hours of expert time every year to do your job.
Tests are simulations. The only perfect simulation is the real thing. Anything less will allow various creative solutions/cheats that will not apply to the real thing. You pretty much have to prevent those by fiat rather than by design.
Imi Votteler • September 17, 2019 10:38 AM
“Using technology” shouldn’t be considered cheating, and should indeed be part of the test.
Clive Robinson • September 17, 2019 11:18 AM
@ Imi Votteler,
“Using technology” shouldn’t be considered cheating, and should indeed be part of the test.
Whilst it’s a nice idea it’s fraut with difficulties, bias and unfairness (if not discrimination).
JonKnowsNothing • September 17, 2019 5:23 PM
@Imi Votteler
“Using technology” shouldn’t be considered cheating, and should indeed be part of the test.
Google is not technology. It’s a private corporation search engine that produces biased results, tilted to the highest paying advertiser for “first page” placement.
It’s not even accurate because “they don’t write the stuff they show” in response to a query. It’s a fancy Listing Service with a BIG NAME. The other search engines are the same.
Not only is the listing biased and tilted, the methods of attaching attributes to a query or possible results are biased because well… “you cannot be unbiased about things you know nothing about”. The Default is whatever they know because they don’t know about anything different.
If you don’t know Kimchi, you don’t know Kimchi.
Using technology is fine but what they are doing is using a portal to access inaccurate information at best and at worst a copy of the exam with the answers filled in.
If they don’t know they answer, they don’t know Kimchi.
ht tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimchi
(url fractured to prevent autorun)
JonKnowsNothing • September 18, 2019 10:27 AM
An example of serious repercussions from being accused of cheating electronically.
There is an ongoing investigation in the UK about foreign students who are required to take an English language test as part of their student visa program. (I don’t know the details of that program)
The Home Office (nothing homely about those folks) summarily revoked 30,000 international visas of people after being accused of cheating on the exam. Some are being investigated for tests they took 5 years earlier.
There was some cheating. The Home Office targeted way more students.
2,500 were forcibly removed and deported. 7,200 left on their own after being told they would be deported. 12,500 appeals. 3,600 proved innocent.
The Home Office’s methods were a flawed response to a 2014 report by the BBC’s Panorama programme. Footage showed “organised cheating” in two English language test centres run by ETS. Voice recognition technology was used by ETS to detect who had cheated by having someone else sit their test. The US firm claimed that 97% of UK tests taken between 2011 and 2014 were suspicious.
Technology in the hands of …
ETS used Voice Recognition Technology to ID cheaters.
No action to proactively identify innocent people
ht tps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/23/toeic-english-test-sajid-javid-urged-to-act-in-immigration-scandal-bigger-than-windrush
ht tps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/18/home-office-rushed-to-penalise-students-accused-of-cheating
(url fractured to prevent autorun)
Clive Robinson • September 18, 2019 5:37 PM
@ JonKnowsNothing,
This scandle, like so many others happened when Mrs May was the Home Office Minister. You might remember the likes of the “snoopers charter” and many more significant blunders to do with security of the individual through to national levels.
She was widely held as being incompetent at anything other than maintaining her political position. This became brutally clear when she became Prime Minister and did little or nothing of any worth untill finally kicked out by her own party, in favour of the even worse Boris Johnson.
Those students who had visas issues had to attend interviews. The requirment was that they had to que up outside a building in Croyden SE London to get in long long prior to their interview time. If they were late (say did not get their before 9AM for a 3PM interview) they were marked as did not attend and moved onto one of the “for deportation” lists as one of Mrs May’s policies. People working their had their abilities thus promotion prospects etc graded by the numbers the got onto those lists[1].
I used to traval to work past the building “Luna house”[1] and see the que not just of students but others such as women refugees with children in the cold dark and rain/snow of winter, some having traveled from halfway up the country.
The whole system as court after court ruled was inhuman and unjust. But to the political party Mrs May belonged to whipping up the equivalent to racial abuse to anyone who was not White Wealthy or Wizened was a way to get ahead with the “grandees” and “blue rinse” brigades who were the self appointed controlers of the mores and morals of the party…
Whilst I can see the “Security” asspects of proper vetting and control of non nationals entering the UK, it all counts for nothing if your real requirment is to pander to political prejudice.
The reason being the least desirable non nationals from a security aspect most would agree is the various terrorists. The thing is terrorists usually don’t work alone, they have a support network that will ensure they avoid the political traps.
Thus the system that Mrs May presided over was when viewed from the National Security and Welfare of Nationals point of view was about the worst it could be.
It’s a danger other nations including the US are falling into, and the only reason it’s not biting back visably is that the number of suicide type terrorists realy is extreamly small.
[1] Having met one or two people who had the misfortune to work there early on in their working lives and then left shortly afterwards, it was not surprising to hear them call it “Lunatic House” or the “inane asylum”. They also used to mention the “Government issue” insecticide spray they were issued with for personal protection from flees, bed bugs, and all manner of other parasites associated with below poverty level living…
RealFakeNews • September 18, 2019 6:28 PM
As an old lecturer used to say when I was studying: “feel free to cheat; you’re only cheating yourself, and when you get a job you’ll be fired on day 1 when they realize you don’t know what you’re doing.”
One way to prevent cheating is to have a database of questions from which the paper is a subset; when the student enters the hall a paper is generated at random and uniquely numbered (not linked in any way to the generation of the paper) and handed to them.
The questions will be in a different order to other students, and they won’t be the same questions.
As people may be aware, an investigation is on-going in the UK after Mathematics papers were leaked online hours before the papers were due to be sat. This has occurred for the last two years.
BigT • September 20, 2019 8:47 AM
Testing companies have been doing this for years. The Commission is embarrassingly behind the times.
Giemona • November 18, 2019 6:14 AM
Double feeling. Indeed, on the one hand, the whole world is witnessing the rapid development of technology, so perhaps this is a justified ban. But on the other hand, it reminds me of https://eduzaurus.com/free-essay-samples/racism/ or rather the direction in which all such prohibitions are moving. It seems to me that very soon accusations of racism and prejudice will surely sprinkle from someone and this will become a vivid example for the same free essay samples.
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Wulf • September 13, 2019 8:53 AM
Let’s wait a few years:
Some organization has recommended that all clothes be banned from exam rooms, basically because it’s becoming very difficult to tell regular clothes from smart clothes.
There is also a discussion about glasses and pencils.