Teaching Students How to Cheat During the Pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Teaching Students How to Cheat During the Pandemic

daveeargle.com

131 pointsreimbar39 comments

The in-person test that inspired this is also quite an interesting read [0], in particular since it draws some conclusions from the methods of cheating used. Definitely a unique assignment, quite indicative of an interesting teacher and class.

0: http://www.rumint.org/gregconti/publications/KobayashiMaru_P...

Interesting, though a little odd. It references three books, and gets the titles of two of those books wrong. It appends an "X" at the end of Little Brother and calls Fatal System Error by the wrong title Critical System Error.

The IEEE paywalled version (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/8013/5968077/05968086.pdf) has a different format with more accurate references.

I really like the student who just brought a pre-filled paper to the examination and handed it in, as if they had filled it out during exam.

That's a fun idea. Sounds a bit like the chuunin exams.

From experience, just memorizing the numbers would be way easier (I did 250 in middle school), but here's my idea:

* Wear pants

* Wire up 10 coin-button-type vibrating motors to a mobile device (with a USB hub and USB-DC adapters, or something to that effect)

* Tape one motor under each of your toes

* Tape the mobile device somewhere inside your clothes that won't be too visible or affect your comfort/posture too much

* Run the wires through your clothes

* Have a program play the digits of pi through the motors with each toe mapped to a different digit

* Ideally you would also be able to start, stop, restart, and rewind at will; maybe this could be handled through buttons behind/under your heels with each action mapped to a short press or long press

I had a similar idea, but I think you've overengineered it slightly:

- Learn morse code for numbers 0 to 9

- Build simple app to run phone vibrate for each number

Personally, I think this would be better with a teammate, who would be able to start/stop/rewind the sequence by having the app listen to a websocket, if the pi-rememberer is asked any questions over Zoom.

We had a similar initial thought, but I was concerned about something like morse code being both too slow and vulnerable to "timing attacks" (professor noticing that the amount of time it takes to recite any digit is directly correlated with what that digit is).

I also assumed that this would be an interactive exercise wherein the professor might stop you to chat midway through and/or drop a few "your audio broke up there; can you back up and repeat the last N digits?"s to throw you off.

That, and it's more interesting if the solution also has a shot of working in person, which is why I didn't go for anything like "hang the numbers around the room".

I'm not convinced that I'd be able to deternine which toe the sensation would be on. If I just use the sensation of touching my toes I have no clue which it is except by knowing where my finger is. Maybe this would improve with practice, but I'd be lost if I had that setup now and went for it

Are you from Houston?

Nope, so far the only time I've spent in Houston has been at the airport. Why?

Sorry just saw this, that was a joke about the Houston Astros using buzzers allegedly to çheat :)

100 digits by next week? Probably easiest to just memorize it?

But that's cheating!

I think for most people that would be a significantly larger time investment.

> Your assignment is to memorize the first 100 digits of pi having been intentionally given so little time to do so that your only chance of completing the assignment is to cheat.

That takes maybe a couple hours. I memorized the first ~50 one day in math class when I was bored. It's been 15 years and I still remember most of them. (Yet, I still can't remember where I left my keys just this morning...)

It would definitely be more work to prepare a method of cheating.

Sure, it says that, but it also says "at the start of the next class".

Even if classes are one day apart, it's perfectly doable without cheating. But that's not the norm. With more than a full day, you've got plenty of time.

How many people were actually listening to the numbers to determine if they were the correct numbers?

If everyone was focused on trying to catch cheating, they may not have noticed.

I would have tried cheating by only memorizing the first ten and last five digits, then make up the rest in the middle.

The goal was to cheat, not to provide the correct answer.

EDIT: Apparently one of the students who originally was given this test, did in fact use this method [0]:

"Another just memorized the first ten digits of pi and randomly filled in the rest, assuming the instructors would be too lazy to check every digit. His assumption was correct."

[0] http://www.rumint.org/gregconti/publications/KobayashiMaru_P...

Had an English teacher where a classmate noticed that there were hardly any comments from the teacher in the middle of our weekly response papers.

He copied the same middle paragraph into his paper and it took 5 weeks before the teacher noticed.

Memorizing the numbers is against the spirit of the assignment, and therefore is the ultimate expression of cheating.

However, if you also prepared a convincing fascade of cheating to for the "explain your method" part, then I would say it is in the spirit and deserves full marks.

I guess it sounds impossible... 10x 10 digit numbers... maybe ??

Memorizing ten phone numbers isn’t hard, and those are perfect size! Give these fake phone numbers to 10 fake friends starting with A through J and you’re golden.

I sat there typing it into my calculator until I built up muscle memory. It's not that much compared to a song, a play or a dance routine.

I memorized the first 100 on a bet in high school and it took me a few days at most. I can still rattle them off perfectly, 20 years later.

Not really in the spirit of the assignment though.

I still remember the first one or two hundred digits from high school. I guess I could say I cheated by going back in time and memorizing it. Perhaps I'd just insist that I didn't cheat at all, wink wink.

In high school, it definitely crossed my mind that I could hide earphones under my hair or wear a bracelet with a different color of seed bead for each digit. That's one of the slower methods, and it's easy to catch if you're looking for it, but it works in person and doesn't require a screen.

A more professional way to cheat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprompter

This could be set up by placing a phone screen on the laptop keyboard facing up, then positioning a 45° piece of glass and some black baffles.

Unless you had multiple teleprompters around the room, that sounds like it would be less successful than the unprofessional ways some of the students came up with.

The teacher asked students to move their camera around during the recitation.

The article has more details about some of the creative ways the students "cheated" and how the teacher tried to catch them. The obvious methods wouldn't work in this situation.

If the teleprompter is attached to the camera, this would still work.

the article also says that one student was asked to turn their back to the camera, which would further confound cheating via teleprompter

It says

> anticipating that I might ask her to turn around

I don't think it's clear whether she was actually asked to turn around.

> and sometimes I asked them to do random challenges such as turn around and continue reciting the numbers

Ah, didn't catch that, my bad.

This exact same thing happens in Naruto E25(not shippuden!)

I participated in some of the early versions of COL Conti's Kobayashi Maru Experiments. He has a lot of other great publications in the cyber education space. Important mentor of mine.

I'd like to note that his thoughts are quite influential still in the US DoD's Cyber communities, including the NSA. I believe it to be very important work.

If you have a touchbar mac, just display it on the touchbar. I don't believe there's a way the camera of your mac can ever see your touchbar.

Finally, an actual use for the touchbar!

Does not work if you're asked to turn around from the camera as the article mentioned - can't see it then.

Absolutely ingenius. I love it!

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