Medical student surgically implants Bluetooth into own ear to cheat in final
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
It makes great clickbait, but it doesn't really make sense. Where would someone implant a bluetooth earpiece into their ear? There's not really a lot of empty space in that area unless someone is very overweight and the device is implanted in layers of fat adjacent to the ear, which aren't great at conducting sound. Did someone really wrap an earpiece in some bio-compatible material, put it in someone right before the test (battery life is limited), and that person was then in a low enough level of pain and/or on enough painkillers that they could still complete the test? I'm extremely doubtful.
But the bigger question is: What use is a 1-way communication device? Did the student have a second cheating instrument to photograph the test and send it to someone off-site? Or did they have someone with the test answers reading them off in real-time ("Question 34 - Answer is C")? It seems this would only be useful in an extremely narrow set of circumstances, if it could be pulled off at all.
Really though, why wouldn't someone just grow out their hair or wear a wig and put an earpiece under their hair? The idea of surgically implanting something that could be easily concealed seems like a modern urban legend.
It'd surprise me if such a simple mitigation wasn't done for more important exams...
Lots of dumb questions on exams that are predictable rote dumps that take away from studying other material.
E.g. a blank page that asks “Draw and label the Kreb’s cycle. Do not use abbreviations”
Over audio, interesting challenge.
Since this is an incredibly common and mundane method of cheating I'd have to say you're right, the headline is entirely clickbait.
Maybe the tests are not testing the right skills.
As a patient I want to see the best doctor possible, and if they have retrofitted their bodies to be more competent at treating conditions I would totally want that.
By analogy, bringing all the printed books or hard drives you want into a chess match might help you with the opening, but not the rest of the game. These days there are chess engines, but before that, cheating required a human accomplice who was a good player, who knew what was on your board and could tell you the right move. My old club had an incident of a guy doing that using hand signals.
Now they won't let you bring any devices at all into chess tournaments, even mechanical wristwatches. A pity. Garry Kasparov famously used to fidget with his watch while playing. You could tell how good his game was by noticing whether the watch was on his wrist or on the table.
Perhaps the medical field is radically different - but I'd wager there's a whole lot of benefit that's been delivered to healthcare by giving doctors access to the internet so they don't need to focus so much of their time on trying to recall vague facts from twenty years prior in school and residencies.
Furthermore, your assumption is that a cheater will be the best doctor. It's not about the method - it's about the integrity. My assumption is that any person taking shortcuts like this to get their degree will also take shortcuts with my personal health, which is not a comforting thought.
The scenario in the article is very different than a potential doctor being upfront about having implants installed to aid them in their duties.
You're making generalizations based on proxy information, which is basically the same thing that a test does you're just using a different set of information to key off of.
Not that there isn't some signal in the pile of noise that you're picking through but a willingness to circumvent academic requirements isn't exactly a strong indicator of performance in the field. Competent professionals fudge requirements they consider to be irrelevant all the time (inb4 no true Scotsman).
That's because they know more than the people who wrote the requirements, because the requirements were written 15 years ago when the medical profession as a whole knew a lot less about $INSERT_CONDITION_HERE.
You'll also notice that those requirements are explicitly written to permit fudging. “Two or more of the below”, “most of these”, “one or more”, “or other reason” etc..
Real doctors can already use external information anyway. They just use the computer, no need to Bluetooth themselves.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/01/politics/harold-bornstein...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/politics/trump-vietnam...
https://people.com/politics/trump-boasted-of-avoiding-stds-w...
“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.”
How it works, where does it go; I have no idea. But clearly it's not a one-off case.
P.S. I think that it's perhaps surgically clipped deep in the inner ear somehow, and not inserted beneath the skin.
I did, but how does this:
> “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed.
…answer the question at all? I’m asking about the “attached to the ear” part and the surgical implant the article talks about without a single detail.
Surely if it’s both easy and common then someone should be able to find a picture of the device or the process.
First, the subject of Indians cheating on exams is something that surfaces in Western news now and again. It's always said that there's these crazy tough exams that determine your life in India. For instance this guy apparently spent 11 years trying to pass. Totally unlikely, who would do that? The point seems to be to underline the importance of exams in India.
Second, the method of cheating is some badly explained but intricate mechanism. Badly explained in that the story is not complete, how exactly is the Bluetooth used? Intricate in that it's some weirdly complicated thing like getting an operation to have this implanted. It's always something that sounds way too complex to be worthwhile.
Third, the authority in charge of catching the cheaters seems oddly well appointed. Would you really send a special squad to check these kinds of things? Sure, check for hidden notes and phones. You really gonna check for Bluetooth? I mean maybe but I doubt it. How could the guy have a crazy special plan for implanting the thing in his ear but not have anything other than an ordinary plan for smuggling in the phone?
To me it reads like that story of a religious couple that don't know how babies are made. Comes about now and again, makes us chuckle, says something recognisable about society, but ultimately sounds not quite true.
Which story are you referring to?
(Doc Daneeka) 'Like that virgin I'm telling you about that couldn't have a baby.'
'What virgin?' Yossarian asked. 'I thought you were telling me about some newlyweds.'
'That's the virgin I'm telling you about. They were just a couple of young kids, and they'd been married, oh, a little over a year when they came walking into my office without an appointment. You should have seen her. She was so sweet and young and pretty. She even blushed when I asked about her periods. I don't think I'll ever stop loving that girl. She was built like a dream and wore a chain around her neck with a medal of Saint Anthony hanging down inside the most beautiful bosom I never saw. "It must be a terrible temptation for Saint Anthony," I joked--just to put her at ease, you know. "Saint Anthony?" her husband said. "Who's Saint Anthony?" "Ask your wife," I told him. "She can tell you who Saint Anthony is." "Who is Saint Anthony?" he asked her. "Who?" she wanted to know. "Saint Anthony," he told her. "Saint Anthony?" she said. "Who's Saint Anthony?" When I got a good look at her inside my examination room I found she was still a virgin. I spoke to her husband alone while she was pulling her girdle back on and hooking it onto her stockings. "Every night," he boasted. A real wise guy, you know. "I never miss a night," he boasted. He meant it, too. "I even been puttin' it to her mornings before the breakfasts she makes me before we go to work," he boasted. There was only one explanation. When I had them both together again I gave them a demonstration of intercourse with the rubber models I've got in my office. I've got these rubber models in my office with all the reproductive organs of both sexes that I keep locked up in separate cabinets to avoid a scandal. I mean I used to have them. I don't have anything any more, not even a practice. The only thing I have now is this low temperature that I'm really starting to worry about. Those two kids I've got working for me in the medical tent aren't worth a damn as diagnosticians. All they know how to do is complain. They think they've got troubles? What about me? They should have been in my office that day with those two newlyweds looking at me as though I were telling them something nobody'd ever heard of before. You never saw anybody so interested. "You mean like this?" he asked me, and worked the models for himself awhile. You know, I can see where a certain type of person might get a big kick out of doing just that. "That's it," I told him. "Now, you go home and try it my way for a few months and see what happens. Okay?" "Okay," they said, and paid me in cash without any argument. "Have a good time," I told them, and they thanked me and walked out together. He had his arm around her waist as though he couldn't wait to get her home and put it to her again. A few days later he came back all by himself and told my nurse he had to see me right away. As soon as we were alone, he punched me in the nose.'
'He did what?'
'He called me a wise guy and punched me in the nose. "What are you, a wise guy?" he said, and knocked me flat on my ass. Pow! Just like that. I'm not kidding.'
'I know you're not kidding,' Yossarian said. 'But why did he do it?'
'How should I know why he did it?' Doc Daneeka retorted with annoyance.
'Maybe it had something to do with Saint Anthony?' Doc Daneeka looked at Yossarian blankly. 'Saint Anthony?' he asked with astonishment. 'Who's Saint Anthony?'
Why not? The check is to wave a metal detector near the person's ear. The main perplexing part to me is the surgery.
So STEM admissions at elite schools (especially medicine and engineering) are indeed very competitive and there are upper middle class families who do think that nothing short of entering these schools is good enough. While 11 years is pretty hardcore, trying for 2, 3 or even 4 years is not uncommon at all. One of my cousins tried for medicine for such schools several times. People that fail admission exams will often not settle for safety schools; these are considered completely worthless in the eyes of someone aiming for elite schools. Instead, they enroll in cram schools to try again the following year. This is pretty normalized, it's even expected that you'd do that after your first fail.
The exact method of cheating doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that cheating using electronics does happen and has happened since forever. It was already a thing twenty years ago when I was going through admission exams. Schools have always had measures against cheating. In my country in the 90s, they were pretty low tech (e.g. enforcing no cell phones), but I hear some places in China now have some seriously over-the-top anti-cheating mechanisms like signal jamming.
What makes it a tall tale is the over-the-topness of it.
I went to a state school in a country where the only way in to university is by taking a test (this was in the early 00's), so I went to one of these cram schools after I finished high school. The cram school was focused on students of lower income families who would otherwise not have the means to attend a more prestigious one, and I remember in the inauguration ceremony for my year's class, one of their former students was invited to give a speech.
Her story was that after four years trying to get into medical school (i.e. four years attending the same cram school), she was given a tuition scholarship to a more prestigious cram school for her fifth year, and then she finally passed the test.
The thing is, this wasn't even an elite school -- it was just the only federal (state-funded) medical school in our state. The fact that the students' only way in was by taking the exam -- extracurriculars were not taken into account there also -- only made it even more of an _achievement_ for you to actually get in, especially if you were not from an upper middle class family.
Finally education reform happened and extensive extracurricular achievements are now taken into consideration.
Now those extracurricular achievements are thoroughly gamed. Helping in homeless kitchen, beach cleanup, book club president, awards at science fair, whatever, you name it, everyone is doing everything now. (mostly richer kids have more help though)
So the kids after reform nowadays, they not only have to prepare for a huge exam, but also find time to do all those extensive activities. Some would even miss the old days where they only have to carefully prep for one exam.
It’s to be expected.
Any metric can and will be gamed. An acquaintance who teaches biology (lot of rote) told me how grades skyrocketed in his classroom after they switched to online classes. He attributed it to students (a lot of them foreign from China and India) being more comfortable asking questions via email instead of in-classroom due to English being their second (or third!) language. I had a different theory.
I’m not surprised most extracurriculars will be created in order to game the system (ever seen a club where all members are presidents?). At least, maybe the kids will do something else (that they are interested in) for a few hours a week instead of spending those cramming to get fraction of points improvement on testing. I recall someone from such country telling me people told him it was a waste of time learning to program (!!) since that wouldn’t help him answer exam questions a little bit faster than his peers. He, at the time, was envious of US kids that could spend time doing robotics or CS and have it count toward something for college admission.
Just wanna share a ridiculous scene I saw on the street: A high school kid with his father at a bus stop. The kid got a window wiper and the dad had a bucket filled with water. I overheard that the kid needed to include more activities on his college application, the dad was dead set on making up this fake community service of washing bus stops. The kid was just going along with this. The dad all of a sudden splashed the water onto a pane of glass at the bus stop and asked his kid to hurry up and take the window wiper to pose for a picture. They snapped pictures from several angles and just bounced! That pane of glass was not even cleaned, only it now confusingly sported a splash of water. My face was laughing so hard in my palm.
I'm from Eastern Europe and I did have to pass tough admission exams to enroll in CS and Math program in University. Medicine and Law School admissions were even tougher.
Things are much more relaxed today, to the point that for some specialties there are no admission exams.
Isn't this essentially what everyone does? We all go to school from grade school to high school (or their locally named equivalents) for about 11 years before our senior/graduation year. All 11 of those years are meant to be building you up to be able to pass those college entrance tests.
Strongly implies it was 11 years in the same college.
I'm just thinking if you spent 11 years and still haven't graduated, maybe it's not for you. If you can't pass the exam, you don't know the material, and you probably shouldn't pursue this career.
Paraphrasing an old joke, what do you call a medical student who graduated by cheating on the exams?
"Doctor"
"The chappal is such it has an entire phone inside and a Bluetooth device. The candidate had a device inside his ear and someone from outside the exam hall was helping him cheat," police officer additional SP Ratan Lal Bhargav of the Rajasthan police .
But yeah searching for info about this stuff feels like probing an area of a video game where the developers didn't put much content, just many duplicates of the same article on different sites, all from around Feb 22.
https://www.ptcnews.tv/mp-student-uses-surgically-fitted-blu...
These exams are quite difficult to clear because of the sheer number of people who are applying for the small number of seats. And yes, there are actual "flying squads" of people who go to the examination centres to check for all sorts of innovative ways of cheating
As for why they use a 1-way device: this method of cheating has been around for decades; you get someone to take the test, they leave early and radio answers in. I don't know the specifics for this particular exam, but India is certainly not the only place in the world w/ extremely competitive admission exams. Back in my days back home some twenty years ago, cram schools would be on stand-by outside school doors, they'd smuggle the question sheet out somehow and flash-solve them / publish answers on the spot for publicity. You could get a full answer sheet online from a cram school website before the exam was over (these exams are hours long) and test takers would frequently do so after finishing their exams to see how they did.
[0] https://www.bodycandy.com/blogs/news/microdermal-implants-bo...
I'm chuckling imagining the 6 hour Putnam exam getting flash solved like that.
In that case the implanted "device" would be a small magnet just inserted into the ear canal, while the bluetooth device is just an induction loop.
https://www.ec21.com/product-details/China-Topro-GSM-Inducti...
Also, competitiveness for some disciplines is seriously no joke: to give you an idea, medicine at Harvard has an admission rate of around 3.5%. Medicine at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil has an admission rate of 0.8%. Admission rates for IIT, India are even worse, at around 0.59%.
And if that isn't discouraging enough, many of these schools have reputations of being "hard to get in, harder to get out" (meaning that actually graduating is ever harder than getting accepted into the program in the first place)
Bluetooth can be 2 ways. But can the implanted device transmit far enough to be picked up by another device or to pick up the sound you are trying to send? Maybe...
As far as how to work it, many of these exams are standardized with a set number of questions. Let's say there are 1000 questions all together and you get tested on 100 of the 1000. You can work out a system where you can get the answers with minimum transmission to your confederate.
It's a lot of work. It seems easier to just study.
One of my economics teacher used to let us fill an index card with information for our exams. We could handwrite as much as we wanted and look at it as much as we needed. So every exam everyone had their card at hand. We would all brag about how small we were able to write. We had to do so much reading and writing to fill up the card that a lot of it stuck in our brain and we hardly needed it. It turned out to be the way he got his students to study. Pretty smart...
From 2013:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/surgically-implanted-headphones...
It's worth noting I've worn a tragus vibrating headphone before, and it works rather well.
He just appears to be both an incompetent medical student and an incompetent cheater.
The thing that got this to the front page of HN is the specific claim of a surgically implanted bluetooth earpiece. That is what PragmaticPulp is doubtful of.
Of course, if the claim was merely that the student was wearing a very small earpiece, such as [1], and that when told to hand it over he claimed it couldn't safely be removed? That would be much more plausible.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/COOMAX-Invisible-Earpiece-Wireless-...
He was caught because he was noticed shuffling a wad of pens too often & then the bifocal glasses were peculiar, prompting some investigation.
He had paid the grain-engraving artist to the tune of $30,000-35,000 for the whole set (2006). It is a lot of money!
Depends on their skill level, and how much focus there was on the process of engraving vs temporarily memorizing the next block of info to transcribe.
After a whole day of char-by-char input.. I knew everything by heart and didn't need to look it up in the calculator.
Unfortunately, there was a foreign student that was so ahead of everyone, that he simply increased the difficulty of the tests and would curve them, excluding that one student from the curve. It was normal for most of the class to get 60s-70s, while this student would get 90s on his exams. I say unfortunately, but only jokingly.
"Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"
Years later, police discovered evidence Sally replaced Timmy’s grandma’s insulin bottle contents with glucose in order to pass that test.
Fortunately more recent exams that I've taken allowed the use of a single sheet of paper as a cheat sheet.
I still have my 48GX. Though I never used it at an exam. As computer science student I simply never had any exams that required a calculator. I just had it for personal interests.
I used the serial cable to hook it up to my computer and loaded it with minigames, to play during class.
You can tell I was not the best of students.
I keep dreaming of modding a 48 series to snatch an esp mcu in it.
It doesn't really aid understanding, doesn't incorporate active recall, and tends to become inefficient for a large corpus of knowledge.
"Oh, I remember I saw something like that in school, let me Google it!"
Medicine, like law, involves a lot of memorization.
Also it's an ever changing field of course.
This seems like a good thing, not a bad thing.
I'd MUCH prefer to have a doctor verify a diagnosis with reference material than to have them rely on their memory.
Yes, it's useful to have that knowledge already, and to that I'd say that copying out a textbook is a poor way to learn. It's far better to know the processes behind things or to learn through experience.
We deliberately have some, though. There's some stuff that's just helpful to memorize to be able to do more active work and understanding with (multiplication tables, basic chemical formulas, sets of trig identities). There's also some stuff inserted (poem memorization, latin & greek roots for one grade, all 50 states for another, etc) just to strengthen the skill of learning by rote for when it's useful later.
edit: but still far from 35000 dollars :D
Like, if there was a question that was easy to answer if you could look at a reference sheet, then why is it important to memorize it? If the test take could understand the question enough to know where to look it up, isn't that good enough?
Would you hire an engineer who couldn't write a FizzBuzz without looking it up?
Yes?
I mean, even after 20 years of writing code professionally, I still don't remember the exact syntax for main methods for each language. Is it public static void main(String args[]) {} for Java, or is it something else? Will I remember that even when I've mostly been coding in Golang this week? Probably not.
I don't remember any of this. I don't remember that it's int main(int argc, char *argv[]); in C, or fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn ::std::error::Error> {} in Rust, or package main \n func main() {} in Go; I derive it anew each time based on my understanding of the language.
And I wouldn't hire me to write C code, because I can't remember where the `const`s go. All I remember is that you shouldn't really use them here, because you're expected to be able to modify argv (and sometimes you have to, e.g. to redact passwords that somebody foolishly provided on the command line). And I remember that #include <stdio.h> lets you use size_t, but don't ask me why.
Then again, I guess I'm proving your point. I could write fizzbuzz easily in C – perhaps more easily than in any language I'm good at – but that doesn't make me a good person to hire if you want a C programmer.
(If the issue is one of time sensitivity then the test should have an aggressive time limit)
Now their engineering school’s seats are sold for more than that.
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.
I think the manner is what makes this story interesting.
In fairness, this one person proved they can do implants :')
> could have major implications in the workforce
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.
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]
I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub invests in VR in some way in the next 5-10 years.
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.
PS explaining for a friend XD
[1]https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-10-05-biden-wore-wire-with-...
[2]https://twitter.com/3ree6ixty/status/1352444645125414913?ref...
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.
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.
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.
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.
2) Those allegations have surfaced around every debate since 2004 (or at least one debate every cycle)
3) Who cares if they were fed lines? Speechwriting isn't their job, nor is memorizing numbers.
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.
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.
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.
FWIW, I'm also wary of embracing full-time VR. I'd certainly like augmented reality, but immersive VR feels like too much yet.
And yeah totally agree - I think one of the biggest changes here is the price. $300 is insane for what you're getting out of the box.
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.
Not to mention that a good 10% or more of people get violently motion sick from using VR.
* 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."
I ended up failing all three.
Couple of points that I omitted.
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."
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?
These people want to achieve status. Minimum income wouldn't help.
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.
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 :(
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".
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.”
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.
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.
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.
If everyday people have near-instant access to information, how will we continue to assess expertise moving forward? Surely it’s not enough to just have access to rote information, like in the case of the cheating test-taker. We will also expect our experts to have the deep understanding that comes from experience in a domain.
Will we need different language to describe flavors of knowledge and expertise? If so, will the nature of test-taking and assessment need to evolve to identify people who actually have an understanding of the thing being tested, instead of testing for rote answers?
Why do math students need to know the sine doubling rule? Not so they can calculate with it (they could look that up) but so they can reduce certain expressions to sin(2x). That's why calculus teaches this stuff.
Why make math students memorize random trigonometric identities that they'll use once and then immediately forget when you could teach them a more general fact that they can derive the identities from?
sin(2x) = Im(cos 2x + i sin 2x)
= Im(e^2ix)
= Im(e^ix * e^ix)
= Im((cos x + i sin x)^2)
= Im(cos^2 x + 2i cos x sin x + sin^2 x)
= Im(cos^2 x - sin^2 x + 2i cos x sin x)
= 2 cos x sin xWe've always expected professionals to have an understanding. We've just been using memorization as a proxy for this.
Any 14yo with a cell phone can go on Reddit give you caned advise about investments or why your car is making a funny noise. But we don't trust teenagers googling stuff with those sorts of things in the real world because there's a huge difference between being able to pattern match information and actually understanding what's going on hence why we don't get advice we care about from anonymous people with backgrounds that can't be vetted
Professional education has a filter in front of it so it's going to be behind the curve when it comes to reckoning with the realities of information access in the modern age but it'll have to figure something better than tests out eventually.
This reminds me of something that I read once - allegedly Aristotle was actually against books; he believed that having ready access to books made it easy to 'fake' the type of education that requires mentorship.
I think Aristotle's perspective doesn't really make sense today because (for better or worse) we emphasize the economic utility of education - is the person actually able to do the job that they claim to be able to? We don't consider the internal changes to the person caused by their education (alas...).
> We will also expect our experts to have the deep understanding that comes from experience in a domain.
I think Chalmer's concept of the extended mind is an interesting framing here - basically it's the notion that your mind doesn't end right at your skull. For the sake of argument, let's assume in the future that we'll have BCI that's good enough to let you text with you mind (something like what Neuralink is going for). If you've got an expert system in your head/pocket that's really good at dealing with some domain and you're really good at _phrasing problems in terms that the expert system can understand_ then you + expert system might have a super-human ability to solve problems in that domain.
If I was hiring for that domain, I wouldn't particularly mind how much of your expertise is in biological tissue.
I think that was Socrates, not Aristotle. Socrates was very firmly against the concept of writing, and we know all about this only because his student was writing down what the teacher was telling him.
And that's all that we'll actually be without memorization. There is a huge gap between someone with knowledge and expertise ingrained in their head, with a solid knowledge of the gaps in their knowledge, or understanding the layout of a knowledge realm that can only come from dedicated study of a subject, vs a dabbler or whatever level of expertise another individual might have with less stringent studies.
This same problem exists in our education system and cramming. You can cram subjects and pass tests, but research had shown that the knowledge gain from this process to be extremely limited.
Without a well ingrained knowledge of a subject, it is difficult to use that knowledge in creative thought, connecting with other realms of knowledge.
If all of these human mental processes are replaced with computation, and people no longer put in the effort to learn challenging things, then I predict large amounts of mental decline. We may already be seeing this process. Perhaps I should say... "As we offload more mental processing to computers...", Because it's definitely a process that many people are going through.
That isn't too say that computerized information is all bad. My wife would probably leave me if I didn't have a calendar app.
Unbelievable. They should have been banned forever.
> An internal investigation has begun in the matter by the university examination committee and devices have been sent for examination.
> After the conclusion of the investigation it would be determined whether the case merits a police case for using unfair means in an exam
It can also serve as additional proof if on the new answer sheet given after confiscating the devices, the exam taker performs significantly worse than on the original answer sheet.
Or you just give them another sheet and worry about punishments later.
Criminal charges for cheating on an exam? Seems a bit absurd to me. I'm all for preventing fraud (especially when were talking about peoples lives), but I also like to think I'm a reasonable human being and criminal action seems unfounded here. It sounds to me like expectations and filters for exams are too unrealistic now combined with lack of alternative realizable opportunities, otherwise you wouldn't see this level of cheating nonsense.
Every day I see more and more ridiculous levels of competitive forces pushed on the bulk of society just to survive and it makes me wonder where the tipping point for social competitive forces for survival begin to exceed natural forces for survival and faith in societies destabilize to a point people just stop participating or at the very least many just "give up." You already see this in Japan, Korea, China (tang ping, "lying flat") and it seems to be an increasing trend in the US. I'm not intimately familiar with India but from what I have seen, it's not roses there either.
We have some fundamentally skewed power and control mechansim increasingly governing people in 'democratic societies' to which citizens seem to have little real democratic say in anymore.
That being said, most such punishment records should generally be expunged once rehabilitation has been completed. We're all human and make mistakes, and only a pattern of misconduct should be permanently on record.
Depends on how you think about it. They're defrauding the institution out of a credential. It really depends on how the relevant laws are worded.
Would you expect criminal charges if you got caught counterfeiting a lottery ticket?
I find everything you said interesting, of course, but I think the legal thing is slightly more complicated.
The problem is really that, under conditions of self-commodification (reification), intrinsic motivation to learn and be a better person is replaced by extrinsic motivation to appear to be a better person. The experience (simulation) means more than the reality - which is a general trend in Western society now proved by the very existence of the company Meta.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...
The 1% of exams that remain problematic are the memorization-style exams that maybe shouldn't still exist in the modern age.
But honestly, if someone were to tattoo the same information onto their arm, there's an argument to be made it was permanently accessible just as much as memory.
I think it’s OK to hold medical professionals to a higher standard.
Maybe if the training were more like the former than the latter, fewer med students and residents would be pulling all nighters on some amphetamine. Personally, going into an ER I'd rather be met with well slept, focused hands that consult the relevant information, rather than a sleep deprived zombie barking out protocol they hypnotized themselves into remembering.
From recent personal experience: pilots need to know certain information so that it can be employed on a whim to help solve time-critical problems. The written exam (which precedes a practical exam) definitely requires memorization.
What I remember out of most courses is not the things I had to memorize, but instead it is the practical components. Those should be the takeaways and things that get tested. Many people also just sucked at memorizing things like that, and I can totally see why cheating is such a problem on these kinds of tests.
Some of the bests tests I've taken where I've remembered the most material have been open book tests that allowed me to use all my textbooks and notes that I had taken. They were hard tests which really tested the understanding of the course material.
Nearly every course I took at a 300/400+ level was about demonstrating a fundamental understanding instead of strict memorization. Open-book tests were more common. And it went down from 150+ students to 20 or 4. Considering my degree is a b.a. in media arts, some senior courses had minimal or no testing at all and instead had large projects.
That said, perhaps one of the hardest classes I took was a 300 or 400 level one on Tarantino films, probably to weed out people who were just looking for an easy class. On top of demonstrating understanding through analysis via storyboarding or papers, the quizzes/tests had multiple choice of 5 answers, which always included "all of the above" or "none of the above", and short/long answers/prompts. You really had to have studied each lecture and actually have watched the relevant films. You wouldn't believe how many people didn't watch the films... in a film analysis class. But all of that aside, it was thoroughly interesting and memorable.
To this end, I agree vigorously that the current state of higher education is both unsustainable and insane, but I think the end game will be more private enterprise & public sector employers deciding to expand intern & apprenticeship programs as an alternative to being constrained in hiring to the pipeline of candidates emerging from top universities. We'll see.
I did a minor in psychology and so many classmates went into things like a 2 year program in HR administration at the local college. Because their degree simply led nowhere. Unless they wanted to continue and get into some highly competitive masters programs there was little in the career prospects.
And then I find Universities in general have been suffering from a lot of admin bloat.
I got off on a bit of a tangent here, but overall I think Universities have been ending up going in the wrong direction. Online learning has made the problem of raw memorization for testing purposes an even more prevalent issue. And instead choosing to test using different/better methods, educational institutions would rather opt to keep using raw memorization while adding privacy invasive programs to monitor students.
The unfairness depends on how steep the cutoff is: does 89.9% mean you miss out on an important life goal, whereas 90.1% means you win?
I did a quick google to find facts on expected individual exam mark volatility, but couldn’t find anything - what keywords do I need?
One pattern to the results I did read is that individual volatility is not even acknowledged - the unwritten assumption is that exams are completely fair and volatility has other dominant causes.
Edit: I am an engineer type with some spectrum attributes and I loath cheats, but over time I have seen how important some “dark” skills are such as: deception, judging when to ignore rules, and meta-games. In some roles or countries, perhaps cheating is a good quality? There is a reason the best card games are about deception. Cheaters are also risk takers, and taking appropriate risks is associated with entrepreneurship. Risks with extreme downsides are interesting.
That said, of course individual variability does exist. In one graduate-level math class I misremembered one theorem which caused me to immediately lose 40/100 points--there were only 5 questions on the exam, and that theorem was central to two of them. Had those two questions been different I probably would have scored much better. I consider that a poorly-written exam, though, since so much of the score was dependent on recalling one theorem correctly. I somehow still ended up with an A in that course, I can only assume through either creative accounting or a generous grading curve.
In any case, I don't know any other method of evaluation which is more fair than exams. Every method of evaluation is subject to similar sources of individual variability and some have other issues in addition. "Fair" in such cases is a mirage. It's not like there's some other objective evaluation that we can use instead of exams, just ones with different biases.
Malcolm Gladwell (yes, I know) did a podcast[1] on the LSAT that's pretty good. In that podcast, he makes a pretty compelling argument that what the test measures isn't very useful.
[1]: https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/the-tortoise-and-the-hare/
This is completely self-inflicted. When the map becomes the territory and exams are lazily written to reward rote, you are no longer testing for reasoning and understanding.
See Caltech as the exact counterpoint with its culture of take home exams and honesty.
A favorite joke:
"One shouldn't do [that medical procedure], as GOD made you perfect and you shouldn't mess with God's! plan!!!"
> Thats an interesting comment, may I ask - was God's plan to manufacture those glasses such that you can see clearly and read such from that book, made by man?
A fellow was stuck on his rooftop in a flood. He was praying to God for help.
Soon a man in a rowboat came by and the fellow shouted to the man on the roof, “Jump in, I can save you.”
The stranded fellow shouted back, “No, it’s OK, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me.”
So the rowboat went on.
Then a motorboat came by. “The fellow in the motorboat shouted, “Jump in, I can save you.”
To this the stranded man said, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”
So the motorboat went on.
Then a helicopter came by and the pilot shouted down, “Grab this rope and I will lift you to safety.”
To this the stranded man again replied, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”
So the helicopter reluctantly flew away.
Soon the water rose above the rooftop and the man drowned. He went to Heaven. He finally got his chance to discuss this whole situation with God, at which point he exclaimed, “I had faith in you but you didn’t save me, you let me drown. I don’t understand why!”
To this God replied, “I sent you a rowboat and a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”
I know a few doctors who have told me they've used this one on people who refuse care for religious reasons. Unfortunately they said it rarely works.
The first episode of Stargate I ever watched sorta touched on this... It's the season 7, episode 5 called "Revisions" with Christopher Heyerdahl. Definitely recommend. It got me hooked on the franchise forever
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/how-to-watch-stargate-i...
As someone who works as dev improving data and efficiency in a business.....i hate people who don't just google things. I implemented something a year ago, maybe its time to refresh my knowledge and see if anything has changed? Some doctors are infuriating, using knowledge they gained 10 years ago. Medicine also changes fairly quickly and quick search could really be a great tool.
Imagine this, I have seen many physicians (40+) at top hospitals about "mysterious" symptoms due to a reaction to a medication. 3 agreed its possible. The symptoms are listed on the medication label, plus I have been tested for everything else under the sun. I have sent research to my primary physician who has said, I am the first patient to change his mind about a drug. A quick search just listing my vague symptoms would bring up a possible reaction, or just looking at the damn label.
Updated versions of their books and medical journals, or even a stackoverflow-like platform where they could discuss and read answers would be magnitudes better.
Maybe humans memorizing tons of information was the best approach for medicine a century ago, but it's not the case anymore
Uh, what is an education other than absorption and integration of information? If they haven't learned (i.e. memorized) a large quantity of information as part of their extensive education to guide them, they have zero chance of "being able to decide which information can be considered good" by definition.
Personally, I would like to see a doctor searching a site made for doctors. Seeing one just do an actual generic online search would not give me much confidence.
As engineers we do it all the time (sometimes subconsciously) when searching for technical documentation. Having that skill in other fields would be a godsend, but the next best thing would be to have someone else do it on our behalf.
It's been a few years since so I don't remember if it was a windows app or a website but it did have a very 90s looking interface.
Wikipedia seems like a poor choice, though. Maybe carpel tunnel is basic enough for Wikipedia to be fine. I've been shown stuff like Mayo Clinic articles.
It's basically medical Google.
The antibiotics she gave me did the trick. She was young, though.
I deal with daily chronic pain which has rendered me essentially unable to work. My full-time job has been “patient” for almost three years.
What I’ve learned is that you have to do their work for them if you want to make progress.
Sometimes that means showing up with highlighted printouts of studies that they would never get around to reading if you didn’t deliver them — and follow up on them — personally.
Other times that means that means playing dumb and “presenting” (not faking, just highlighting) the right preliminary symptoms to get a key test ordered.
I’m lucky in that I have education. I can read a study. I understand probability and statistics. I can learn terminology and use it (somewhat) correctly in a sentence. I often wonder how people without a STEM background get any care at all. Perhaps they don’t?
It’s a horrible, broken system that amounts to little more than insurance-mandated gatekeeping.
Compare that with Dentistry. I had a problem and walked in with an hour's notice, had a x-ray from a handheld scanner emailed to me with the problem highlighted within 5 minutes like something out of Star Trek.
Anyway, then you have companies like Theranos who come along and prove why it’s a good idea to be risk adverse. Snake oil has been sold for a long time, and it really isn’t until “recently” that it has been illegal to sell it (since a bit after 1906, in the US).
In Australia all imaging is stored on the cloud somewhere. For a reason unknown to me, you still get the huge envelope. But inside is just a piece of paper with some public id and a QRcode. You don’t really need these. The doctor who ordered the imaging will automatically get forwarded the results. If you are refereed to a specialist, they will get it to.
In this community we sometimes talk about how some technical interviews are deeply unrealistic because they remove the candidate from, e.g. their IDE with tab autocompletion, or googling, which you might normally depend on. Your skills are best measured when you have access to the tools and environment which you'd actually use while working. And yet ... sometimes you can pair program with someone and it's clear that they don't really understand what they're accepting from the autocomplete, and this is legitimate cause for concern.
I think I want doctors to definitely know a bunch of stuff unaided, even if they would normally always have access to supplementary references. If nothing else, they should have the habits of mind to be able to critically evaluate their references, and notice when they're wrong or suspect.
The downside to open book exams is they can take a lot more effort to mark. And actually paying attention to filthy undergraduates is a bit infra dig, dontcha know?
I'd like to read a long form piece on this subject. What's being done about it? India is a huge country, they need specialists no doubt!
India has both low number of doctors per capita, and low supply for educating doctors.
That is not the perfect proof, but I am also coloring it with my anecdotal data about which percentage of kids were enthusiastic to learn any advanced topics in school such as math, physics, chemistry, much less memorize a metric ton of advanced biology information.
It is true that supply is artificially restricted in the US, of course. In many ways, not least which is an unnecessarily expensive and lengthy certification process. But I cannot imagine anyone with the average discipline being able to come close to a full fledged MD.
In the United States, the supply of medical doctors is artificially limited by state laws that prohibit the practice of medicine without a license. Licensing requires successful completion of an accredited medical residency program, which on turn requires completing an MD degree from an accredited medical school. The American Medical Association and similar state-level groups effectively control the number of residency and med school slots by controlling the accreditation process.
Most of the rest of the world has similar systems in place, including India.
On the one hand, the AMA system has been described as a means of guaranteeing the quality of doctors, and preventing unsuspecting patients from being hurt, killed, or defrauded by poorly trained doctors.
On the other hand, it's also been described as cartel designed to allow doctors to charge inflated prices for medical care, by limiting the supply of doctors, and extracting unreasonable rent from the public.
Most economists would agree that both descriptions are basically correct.
German doctors I believe make under 100 grand.
The license limits could be direct, like taxi medallions in New York City... Or the limits can be indirect, like how the AMA defines the number of medical residencies in the United States.
Even in supposedly "free market" countries like the United States, we often have significant restrictions on all sorts of markets. The reasons vary.
I wonder how many potential visionaries get filtered by association with these cheaters as well as more traditional racism.
So basically I'm able to control my processor and during boring meetings or family events, I can switch to T mode and listen to music / podcasts, without anyone noticing that. I can even having it balanced.. 50%/50% , or 80% / 20% etc..
I'm sure that it would be so useful in cheating in exams.. hard to identify.. you have aid hearing, they never expect you will cheat with that.
I'm wondering what will happen if Deaf people will be caught doing that? they won't be allowed to hear at all during exams?
That sounds cool to be able to tune out of boring meetings easily. I imagine the number of podcasts you can listen to is more than most people, any favorites related to software?
Medical student: "one time I hacked my ear..."
It happens because people aren’t coached or mentored at all, and are too ashamed to ask for help. With proper guidance and encouragement, and hard work, anyone can pass.
Poor patient outcomes aren’t strongly linked to poor learning of exam material. It is true that the sort of person who doesn’t take care to do well on exams also may not take care of patients. This isn’t because they don’t learn the material, it is because they aren’t the sort of person who can commit to being good at medicine (for which there may be valid reasons).
There is another factor people tend to forget: cheating is exciting and almost fun in a way.
Reading a book for hours with no end in sight? Boring. Learning morse code and making a little radio equipped foot pedal? Now that's something I'd do in my free time.
During covid I wrote a plugin that hooked into the proctoring site, undid the randomization on the ordering of the multiple choice questions and put a little dot for every answer by another user of my plugin taking the tests. This was to alliviate the chaos of 10 people talking over eachother in a teamspeak, asking for the parts they don't know. It was infinitely more rewarding than learning about graph theory.
Speaking of cheating though, I heard they have directional speakers that have a spread of only like a foot. With something like that it seems like it’d be easy to cheat.
Yeah, but they still spread enough to be audible, and the reflections are audible as well. In a testing environment it would be hard to completely hide.
I'm surprised so many people speak of these as something they haven't experienced. I recall at least two grocery stores I've been in using these to beam ads at people while they were in line, and that was years ago, and I'm not in SV either, it's not like people around here use cutting edge tech for the heck of it very often. Mercifully, they didn't last long. While I didn't enjoy the ads, I did enjoy the opportunity to hear exactly how they work and get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
(It is absolutely true that they are garbage at bass frequencies, and the lower midrange as well. The ads were all voiced by women, because I'm not sure men would even have been comprehensible. I mean that literally. Their lowest frequency response is that high. As clever as they are it's not a surprise we don't hear them more often. They are super specialist gear not suitable for most tasks.)
1. people generally being against cheaters (and people also generally acknowledge that there are statistically significant amounts of cheaters)
2. people also generally (and probably with a decent overlap with the 1st group) being against hazing-style complex and difficult interview processes
I'm not saying being a farmer and lying about being a software developer.
But a mediocre software developer with good social skills can definitely bullshit through a top level software interview, barring the strictest of interviewers.
Then it turned out that a squad came to interrogate and search which sounds ridiculous. And then it turned out that he admitted to it. And then another student was caught with a non-implant device.
Sounds ridiculous
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/ips-officer-caught-che...
No gadget will save you from examiner like that one.
Fermat's last theorem was formulated in 1637 and proven in 1995, 358 years later. In those 358 years we can assume that at least 4 very long lived generations of people lived (more like 6-10 based on average life expectancies at the time).
Being "close" to something doesn't mean anything. Doing it is the real challenge. Everything before that is wishful thinking.
At some point, we are going to have to figure out how to test understanding instead of knowledge.
I distinctly remember being asked "what is the win32 function that does X" in an interview many years ago. My answer was "no idea, that's what msdn is for".
I've been personally approached by an acquaintance to assist them in cheating on an oral exam in the final stages of medical school. I obviously refused. I /really/ don't think I put off the vibe of someone who would be OK with cheating, so the fact that even I got wind of plan to cheat leads me to believe it could be fairly prevalent.
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"A member of the team, Dr Vivek Sathe, frisked the student and found a mobile phone in the inner pocket of his trouser. The phone was switched on and connected to a Bluetooth device, Dr Dixit said. However, the team did not find a Bluetooth device on the student.
On sustained questioning, the student confessed that an ENT surgeon had fitted a skin coloured micro Bluetooth device in his ear.
The squad also found another student with a small SIM-powered device and a micro Bluetooth device, but the student informed the squad that it was not inserted surgically and can be removed with a pin.
The devices have been sent to an internal examination committee, which will decide whether a police case for using unfair means in an exam should be filed, Thakur said.
Dr Anand Rai, the whistleblower in the so-called Vyapam scam, where various competitive exams were rigged, 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.”
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Many here take that high-risk path, even though they know that clearing the entrance is just step 0, and there are tougher exams further. Such is the mindlessness at display.
Probably they should just have people go through a metal detector before the test, to identify all these hidden devices.
How would a metal detector stop it? If you say the metal detector is picking up a piece of shrapnel from an accident while young, how can they really disprove that?
X-Rays? MRI? Or requesting medical documents about it? (can all be done afterwards)
Anyway, I'm not sure whether it's considered unethical to help a patient electively implant a bluetooth receiver in their bodies, but falsely signing a medical release card probably is.
Turns out, the act of programming the formula made it easy for me to recall it without cheating.
The whole university and community knows, what are you really benefiting by keeping their name private. Publicize their face and name. Plaster it on every news site. Nobody wants a doctor who cheated in medical school. Also surprising because universities have dual tracks for graduating that most people don't know about. If you are wealthy or well connected, you get to graduate regardless of academic performance. Some professors also get kickbacks, threats, stopped favors if students aren't allowed to graduate. Perhaps the current administration of the school is not politically or power aligned with this student's connections?
In the states it takes a long time too: 4+ year undergraduate, 4 year med school, 3-4+ years residency. My sister was around 27 to 28 when she graduated medical school, before even starting her four year residency.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Medicine,_Bachelor... [2] https://www.shiksha.com/college/mahatma-gandhi-memorial-medi...
It's been 15+ years since I've been in any sort of major exams. Are surprise checks like this common these days?
https://www.cnet.com/culture/surgically-implanted-headphones...
The effect would make it completely concealable.
Also it's worth noting that where the implants are completely make sense. I once wore a set of headphones that just vibrated the tragus, and was lightweight and allowed me to hear what else was going on.
Apparently the occulus uses this in the same capability.
If you fail the Google entrance exam, you can retake it and/or work at any of a dozen of other great careers
Several years ago they uncovered a large SAT cheating scheme, out of Thailand. They even made a movie about it : https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bad_genius
And that was using way more rudimentary technology. There are a lot of rich kids willing to pay their way to a deegre.
Stackoverflow is about to get much more interesting.
If you're not familiar with modern behind the ear hearing aids, Bluetooth is pretty common on better ones. It's like ear buds in an extremely discrete for that also happen to help you hear normally.
>I need you to help me pass an oral exam
>>Whats the subject?
>>>Biology
>>>>uh... whats your gag relfex like?*
What's up with all the legacy accounts acting up lately?
- How did the "necklace" connect to a phone? (Since you were talking over the phone)
- Was it bidirectional communication? How did friend communicate with you?
Id rather fail an exam than put a tiny magnet into my ear in the hopes to get it back out...
[edit] omg [1]
https://www.amazon.com/bone-conduction-glasses/s?k=bone+cond...
> SoundBite was developed and marketed by Sonitus Medical, Inc. The company filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, January 15, 2015,[1] as a result of the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' decision not to cover the device.[2]
:(
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDkDg33uGuc
My favorite part is when he describes the recharging procedure :D
But it is reasonable that any programmer familiar with the assistance of an IDE would want the syntax highlighting, formatting and more mapped into the browser during live coding exercises.
Though, I suppose if this was a test of their skill in cosmetic surgery, then detection certainly would count as a failure.
Second, I think most amateurs could probably cut someone open, put something in and stitch it up. Not causing further complications would be the hard part.
That's why you gotta shop around for doctors when you can and evaluate them as people.
There were things, e.g. the NorthStar implant, which became EmbediVet. But for aforementioned safety issues, it wasn't even used for cows.
Passive tech is the only thing right now (RFID, NFC)
Just like when you are allowed a cheatsheet for the exam
edit: paywall bypass https://archive.ph/CCXpf
Funny story, I dealt with a pylonidal cyst on my tailbone by myself. I did not expect that much blood tbh (along with very stinky puss... sorry for the detail), but I managed to drain and clean it.
Apparently you need surgery for those... it really wasn't that hard, cutting in was the hardest part, but at that point the pain from it was worse.
I do hate it when cats come out of infected spots.
just don't take their javascript
This happened in India. The student was caught with a mobile phone, which in turn led to further questioning.
I know people in faculty, this is what is reported. A google search would suggest the same. It's far more culturally accepted to cheat in University in certain parts of the world, e.g. India, Saudi Arabia.
In fact let me do it for you, here's one article on it - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/29/india-exam-c...
Stop projecting and grow up.
Sure. Here's a good example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30676394
I saw this in my CS program (and heard about it from other programs.) None of the classes taught people to program, they just expected people to know how already, and as a pretense assigned everyone a programming instruction book (in the program's official language) that was never covered through lecture. The non-programmers would immediately start falling behind and cheating together to tread water. I definitely saw people graduate who had no ability to program; they were busy enough figuring out how to cheat.
an aside: CS programs are spoiled by hobbyist programmers like me who learned for fun when they were children, and they act as if everyone was a hobbyist. Plenty of people entering CS were just comfortable with math and liked playing video games. They foolishly expected to learn how to program at programming school.