A lot of people are missing the bigger point here.
This person was just one who got caught. The likelihood that they’re the first one to think or do this is very low.
There are probably more sophisticated ways of using tech to cheat and I would be very surprised if they haven’t been employed in high stakes exams like this before.
About 5 years ago, I had 3 students who worked as a team to cheat.
* The ringleader placed his iPhone under his leg.
* He would lean back in his chair and hold the exam sheets up in the air. It looked a little unusual, but it (initially) seemed innocuous.
* What he was really doing was pointing the sheets downward toward the camera peeking out from under his leg.
* He was broadcasting the exam to God-knows-where.
* He and the other two students then received answers via tiny earpieces.
* In addition, the two other students would call me over to "ask clarification questions." In reality, they were trying to distract me while the ringleader broadcast the exam.
* I eventually realized they were cheating (after exam 1), but I couldn't figure out how, until another student (exam 2) approached me with a note that read, "The guy to my right has his phone under his leg. Every time you circle the room, he pushes it completely under his leg so you can't see it."
* At that point, however, each student was taking a slightly different exam (unbeknownst to them).
The ringleader emailed me at the end of the semester and said something to the effect of: "I know I don't deserve to pass, but if you fail me, I will have to stay an extra semester."
What fascinates me is that everyone always separate into just two camps:
1. Cool! Tell me more! I love these puzzle/strategy games. Both how to cheat and not get caught and how to catch the cheaters.
2. Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?
For once, I would love for someone to step back and ask:
What the actual fuck is going on here?
Some people are apparently spending up to 11 years (on top of high school) trying to get a certificate, that would help them maintain certain socioeconomic status. Other people are actively preventing them in getting the certificate in other ways than the official ones.
This costs an incredible amount of money. The whole overhead is insane. Whole lot of people routinely spend several YEARS without actually receiving the certificate. College education is crippled, because it needs to prevent fraud first, teach people useful things second.
Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
In my particular case, this was not an issue.
I don't want to go into detail, but the students were from a foreign country (this is part of why it was going to be a political nightmare for the Dean).
Two of the three could barely speak English (excepting the ringleader). I mention this ONLY because it was a big tipoff when reading their first exams: they all used idiomatic English phrases that were far beyond what they were capable of in casual conversation. They also used nearly identical phrasing when explaining their answers (another big tipoff).
If anything, I blame their university for admitting students who were incapable of succeeding without cheating. The whole escapade left me feeling dirty. The university admits foreign students (because enrollment/$$$). And they have to know many of the TOEFL scores are either unreliable or fraudulent.
> Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?
This is not the sentiment I'm getting here. More like "wow, I hope I don't get a cheater for a doctor, and if they go into research they are likely to fake results in studies. This is a unfair to society, their future employers and subjects"
It's not about fairness in the socioeconomic ladder as much as the damage and cost incurred by having an incompetent fraud in a high-impact professional role.
While I agree with your sentiment, these people aren't aiming for "livable wage" but for (from their perspective) "the top".
> Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
Australia has a kind of free university for all. Australian citizens get an interest free loan of about $5k/year for tuition. You just pay it back by paying a little more tax on your income over $47k/year until it's gone. If you don't earn over $47k/year, you never pay it back, which is fine and expected. It's also easy to get welfare for housing and food as a student, so university is mostly "free". (For various values of free)
Even with all of that, plenty of people still cheat on university exams. I was shocked to learn about it, but there are always people who take that route.
Medicine is a large topic. It requires many years of memorization, experience, etc., and then it requires continuing education and constant practice. This makes the costs of medicine very high.
There is an opportunity for technology to help lower costs. The opportunity was identified decades ago, when the first work was done on expert systems for medicine.
The problem is that this means that if we succeed at applying technology to lowering the cost of medicine, it will look a lot like patients self-diagnosing. In rich countries we really don't like that. In poor countries self-diagnostics is common.
We can lower the cost of care by having lower credentialed providers such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners handle the simple cases. Patients in rich countries have already been self diagnosing for years.
This is what we did in the Netherlands. Anyone could afford to study if they wanted to, and pay equalisation kept the gaps low. Social housing provided good and cheap places to live.
Until neoliberalism hit though. Then everything was about the market and the ideals of low pay gaps were budget cut into oblivion. Now there's huge inequality and students have to take out huge loans like in the US :(
First, I was teaching at a local community college. The students were from a nearby university. They were trying to avoid the equivalent classes at their own school and I assume they felt that I might be an "easy mark." I'm not sure what my options were with respect to reporting them to their own university.
Second, I was an adjunct at the community college. I informed the Dean of what was going on, but I got zero support. I could tell that the Dean felt that all I was doing was bringing him a problem that had the potential to mushroom into a political nightmare (no upside, only downside for him). The unspoken message that I got was, "Just deal with this on your own and don't turn it into a federal case." I don't know if the lack of support was due to me being an adjunct or whether it was due to "We need to keep our enrollment numbers up. Don't get a reputation for being a ball-buster."
Tuition-paying and academic integrity are inherently at odds with one another. If every student has earned their place via scholarship, you can kick them out freely to reallocate the scholarship pool toward students who haven't gotten caught cheating. For students paying their own way, the thought they'd get expelled for cheating may dis-incentivize them from applying even if they have no concrete plans to cheat.
A teacher failing their students involves a lot less paperwork and formal proceedings than going through the expulsion process. Given how busy they tend to be, signing up for all of that extra work isn't an inviting proposition.
Exactly, that's one of the main issues I encountered in "academia" : you're expected to play along and ignore cheating because the goal is to have more students for as long as possible, not less.
I proctored an exam once in an auditorium. You could kind of see over the person in front of you's shoulder even though they sat every other seat or whatever. I'm pretty sure there was a group of friends sitting in a six deep echelon formation as some kind of cheating daisy chain but I could never prove it.
I took an exam once. Guy next to me seemed to be looking at my paper but I wasn't sure, so I stayed quiet. Later in the exam, I got stuck on a problem or made a mistake, and he tapped me on the shoulder and told me the answer. Remembering that just now made me smile. This wasn't a high stakes medical school type of thing though, just a normal classroom quiz.
The community at DEF CON and other hacking cons have been playing with bio implants for some time, including low power RF. I came here to point out what you just said - that they got caught, which signals incompetence.
I do think the bio-implanted device space is going to explode at some point. Here's where I see us headed:
* VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.
* Once very portable VR becomes a thing, augmented reality wearable glasses. As in real-time, amazing visuals that are seamlessly stitched into your reality, and so advantageous you won't want to live without them.
* Then bio-implanted augmented reality with wireless charging through the skin.
That's how I see the next 30 to 50 years unfolding in terms of devices. The first step is VR as the next big platform play. Incidentally I see three spaces there:
1. VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]
2. 360 film [Already here but cameras getting WAY better very fast]
3. Immersive vision-based augmented reality - visuals overlaid on regular vision. [Not quite here - but we do have PoC's and will be in the next couple years]
> VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.
I just got a Quest 2, and totally agree. It's incredible for what it can do for the price. And that it's untethered. Anyone who's into tech or interested in the future of tech should get themselves a Quest 2. The immersion level of games like Superhot VR was totally mind-blowing to me.
I also think it's the future of home workouts. If Peloton's not working on a VR system then they'll be done in five years.
I'm looking for more workout apps, so I will check that out. I've been pretty impressed by Les Mills Bodycombat, though I find the banter/encouragement of the presenters/coaches barely tolerable (I believe I can turn them off in the latest update; I'd like a switch for "style/form tips only")
There's a line I can't cross; I like being physical. The Internet and its medusa of services already takes me away from meaningful choices, why should I deepen that connection that feels so overwhelmingly oppressive already?
I suspect VR porn will be a huge driver of this technology. The porn industry both has the money and the desire to push the envelope into new offerings.
I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub invests in VR in some way in the next 5-10 years.
There's already a "pornhub" for VR called sexlikereal. You can watch videos and even connect toys that are synchronised with the video. The platform seems to be getting pretty big and even produces some of their own videos.
Yeah, while most people will avoid this conversation - they were huge innovators in early eCommerce, and it's an obvious use case.
But there are also other super exciting applications like dating e.g. a dating app facilitates the first date in VR and is able to provide safety controls making first-dates far more approachable and happen earlier on leading to more successful relationships.
Implants may be coming sooner or later but the rest of society doesn't stand still, and as we extrapolate trends into the future, one thing seems very clear:
You will not own the implants in your body.
They will be owned by a separate third party. You may still pay for them, and you may get some value out of the proposition, but they will not be under your control.
That's perhaps the most important aspect of our future.
So long as we live in a free market economy I would hope consumers wouldn't be as stupid as to go that route. Sure, with music, movies, and even electronic peripherals many people go the rent vs buy route. I imagine however that many more would have issues with ownership and bodily autonomy if the items were actual physical implants.
Gibson did it in Neuromancer in 1984 and others before that. Even if the bio interface problem isn't solved, lightweight wearables that encompass all your vision and are super performant with a massive dev ecosystem and incredibly useful will be a reality in a couple decades.
Earpieces were alleged during the last presidential debates[1] (fact checkers said this was false), and other places[2]. How would one detect an implant?
Were they alleged by anyone with a shred of credibility? Natural News is somewhere below the late, lamented Weekly World News in terms of being a news source you should take seriously.
Natural News is an extremely accurate source. Just take anything written on the website, take the exact opposite position, and you will be correct more often than night.
My personal preference would be to put each candidate on multiple 3 to 4 hour long-form podcast interviews so we can get some idea of what they are like.
That being the case, one has to imagine that 30 seconds taken from the final hour of a four-hour podcast (or, potentially, anywhere in the middle) have the potential to be quite different in insight than 30 seconds take from the first hour.
The longest period we have seen a presidential candidate speak extemporaneously for is ~90 minutes (Biden town hall) which is an exceedingly rare occasion that came with pre-arranged questions and was mostly prepared talking points anyway.
One of the aims of a longform podcast would be to extend the interviewee out beyond their prepared talking points to see what happens.
One of the big problems is that certain sections of the press will just be hoping for you to fail, and will go over every word with a fine comb to look for something to moan and bitch about in the most bad-faith negative interpretation possible. Furthermore you need to be a renowned expert on any issue, cannot be seen to be thinking about something for more than a nanosecond, cannot hesitate in their answers, etc.
We are asking for too much of our politicians, so they will find ways to cope out of necessity, by limiting the exposure. We all like to think that we'd do better, but after being shafted by twats who call themselves journalists a few times we'd all be doing the same.
The problem you describe is why presidents will only sit down for interviews with anchors/journalists/networks who they have some guarantee will treat them favorably.
It's ironic that to get more than this from politicians, it seems we need to be MORE forgiving of them. That is a hard pill to swallow, as a citizen.
> The problem you describe is why presidents will only sit down for interviews with anchors/journalists/networks who they have some guarantee will treat them favorably
That's not true. Only the last president outright refused to engage in unfriendly press. Obama may have called on Fox reporters less often and only got interviewed once or twice on the network, but he still engaged them.
Or, accept that listening to and trusting a capable team of advisers is perhaps a better qualification for the role than thinking on your feet, and definitely better than being able to recall which of your rehearsed sound bites to use in response to which prompts.
Standing in your home office, sweating, with foggy vr glasses, trying not to fall down or run into walls while looking at low-poly NPCs coming at you, trying to use bizarre, disembodied "hands" to keep them away. What's not to love?
I have played VR. Several headsets in different setups. It's fun if you are riding a VR roller coaster or sitting in a boat as a tourist, but the only games I played that were halfway decent were Beat Saber and Alyx. Those games have addressed the controls issue better than the other games I've tried, but the sweating, fogged goggles, and the aching feet definitely still showed up in those games.
If you have not tried something with a cockpit (like Elite: Dangerous), it's worth a shot. I found it very accessible and actually quite fun, even though I hate the game outside of VR.
>> VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]
>Is it though?
Yes. The Quest 2 is incredible. No PC required, just a headset and 2 hand controllers. Games give you a completely immersed experience in a synthetic world where you can look around, explore, play, talk to other players in real time.
It is here and I would call it super fun, but not useful (maybe that's what you were questioning). I think it may be a fad like the Nintendo Wii, or it might hang around to varying degrees. Maybe I lack imagination but I don't see people wearing AR glasses in public or to work even if they do become ultra-compact and awesome.
Some people let their excitement lead them to believe "cool fun new thing" is somehow the magical future. I played Dactyl Nightmare (VR) back in the 1990's and have been waiting for awesome home-VR since then and quest is every bit of what I had imagined maybe it could be. But at the end of the day, rec-room paintball is just Dactly or Quake Arena. A 25yr old guy at work had to show me Mario Tennis on his Switch - it's just pong with special moves and fancy graphics. What's new is old, and I don't see any revolution with VR outside of niche applications like training and some visualization. Now get off my lawn while I go play some EchoVR.
I haven't tried the Quest 2 yet, so I don't know how good it is, but to me, it's not "completely immersed" until you can interface directly with my brain to feed it false visual, auditory, smell, touch, etc. signals, as well as interpret signals I make to move around, which causes me to interact with the virtual world instead of the real world.
Anything else to me just feels kinda clunky. Certainly the stuff available now is way better than stuff from 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, but it's a far cry from complete immersion.
It sure is clunky yes. It's certainly not totally immersed.
But it's so much more immersive than what we had before that it's still really amazing. If you had skipped computers in the 80s and 90s because they were nowhere like perfect yet, you still works have missed out on an amazing time. The same is happening now.
Never understand why people imagine this progression. I love gaming, but wouldn't really see the need to implant a PS4 into my body even if it were small enough. And outside gaming and entertainment in general, VR just doesn't have any compelling use cases. Even in gaming, VR controls are still horrible, and games are actually more limited in the range of actions your character can take - since there just aren't enough buttons on any controller to simultaneously move and interact fully enough.
Not to mention that a good 10% or more of people get violently motion sick from using VR.
There was a dystopian poem in the 1980's that ended with someone unable to go to sleep at night because there was a constant blinking red light when he closed his eyes from the AT&T answering machine implant in his eye.
I suspect that after augmented reality wearable glasses we'll transition to AR contact lenses first, and maybe even stay there, before we go to full-on implants.
It will come. FB is investing the big bucks but once they start seeing real success (and they are) others will see the value and start competing for real.
Try passthrough on Oculus Quest 2 to get an idea of how easy this is to solve. It just uses the motion sensor cameras and it's pixelated and black and white, but you get some overlays and you can get a very good idea of how quickly this will be solved in full 8k hidef with overlays that look like they belong.
A simple solution would be to have liquid crystals on the glasses, like electronic auto-darkening sunglasses or welding helmets. Of course, this could only change the light level of the entire field of view at once (since it's way too close to your eye to focus), but that's still useful for many things.
You really don’t need high tech to cheat in exams. I was studying a few years ago (I was a mature student) and there were a few kids who took 3-4 toilet visits in a 2 hour exam to review notes on their phones after seeing the questions. The school can’t search you before the exam (i.e they can’t stop you carrying a phone) and they can’t watch you in a toilet cubicle. All these kids did well in their degree despite being idiots in classes and lectures.
> You really don’t need high tech to cheat in exams.
Although now ubiquitous, excluding two cups and a string, phones have always been high tech, as opposed to low tech, like feigning a need to use the restroom to develop their cheating space, as obvious and overused as it is. I wonder who first pioneered the fake bathroom visit for cheating, as opposed to it being employed as an escape from the extreme pressures of the classroom, i.e. smoking.
I don't know that this is an option everywhere. It is categorically not allowed to use the toilet during an exam here, so this is a thing that you cannot do.
Whether the story is true or not, I think there's an even bigger point. I believe augmentation is coming. There will be a time in the not too distant future when disabling communication for almost anything else will be near unthinkable. I can imagine kids growing up with instant access to info and communication via neural link to feel threatened/stressed/horrified to be disconnected, similar to tearing a child away from its parent.
I'm not making a judgement whether that's good or bad. I'm sure plenty will chime in with their opinion. I'm only bringing up the world of always on computing is probably coming and schools will need to find some other way to test students that don't require handicapping them by removing what they perceive as part of their brain.
If you get used to it at a young age, it probably won't be the traumatic thing you describe. E.g. have Faraday cage test booths in schools starting as early as Grade 1.
Won't help much with recordings, of course, but that's more like a cheat sheet that's always on you; if you can succeed with it in a well-designed test environment, you can probably succeed with it in real life. At some point, if you're augmented, then memory is memory and there's no point in distinguishing between hardware and wetware.
This was my first thought, but I'm skeptical this ends up being as bad a problem as you imply. You don't just pass an exam and then immediately get sent to an operating theater and given a scalpel. You do a medical internship and residency, and are supervised by experienced doctors. (Yes, I know, this is the US system, but I'd hope the systems in other countries would be similar, or at least provide similar protections.) I would expect a cheater like this might not perform well enough to ever make it into an operating room. And even if they did, it would only be in an assistant role, where they would likely show their incompetence pretty quickly.
Sure, the system overall isn't perfect, but detecting incompetence on the job (before being allowed to do any damage) is IMO the most likely scenario for cheating medical students who don't get caught at school.
Even if we consider other disciplines... say, civil engineering. You don't get your degree and then immediately get the job of Principal Engineer on a bridge-building project. You're supervised by engineers with more experience, and your work is checked and signed off on if it's correct. If your work consistently fails those checks, you'll get fired.
>I would expect a cheater like this might not perform well enough to ever make it into an operating room.
Implying that material they are testing is relevant in a practical setting ? I actually wonder if they ever do something like random tests for people that are 5+ years into their career - just unannounced testing to check retention and relevance.
If it's anything like CS I wouldn't be surprised if they would fail >90% people. People here complain about having to invert binary trees in an interview...
An even bigger point is being missed... the underlying cause, the societal pressure to get a degree in india is so great that people will do almost anything.
Yea but how about the lower stakes examinations in more developed country with less selectivity pressure like the US? The incentive to cheat if you're a poor performer is still high.
I shudder to think how many future doctors with a poor moral compass are getting through the system. Not only is their incompetence dangerous, their lack of ethics and craftiness could mean that they'll be harder to detect.
Yup, and their lack of moral compass combined with sufficient craftiness to hack the system could have major implications in the workforce. They'll be incompetent and unethical but hard to detect.
I don't think this is the case. Large bodies of people already operate as if they are completely amoral today (and realistically must be engaged with as if they are to get anywhere), so what major implications could a single actor with "lack of a moral compass" really have? That's completely ignoring the issue where I'm not sure what it is even supposed to be.
Dr Anand Rai, the whistleblower in the Vyapam scam [of 2008-2013], said: “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed. Such a technique was used by a Vyapam scam accused too to clear his medical exam eight years ago.”
This person was just one who got caught. The likelihood that they’re the first one to think or do this is very low.
There are probably more sophisticated ways of using tech to cheat and I would be very surprised if they haven’t been employed in high stakes exams like this before.