For the sixth year, Algeria blocks internet to prevent cheating during exams | Hacker News Reader

For the sixth year, Algeria blocks internet to prevent cheating during exams

newarab.com

77 pointswlkr66 comments

I wonder how many of the more technologically sophisticated students setup p2p networks.

In high school one of the better Calculus students in my class had written a script using his graphics calculator. The script could complete certain classes of problem automatically while showing every step of workings. Kinda like the p2p network: the kids with the skill to set it up probably don’t need any extra help on the exams.

In high school they cleared our graphing calculators before each exam, it had become too widespread.

My friend's work around for that was a pixel perfect reproduction of the screen saying the calculator had been cleared.

Decisions on par with blacking out the internet. (But clearly not as severe.)

If your test depends on preventing students from precomputing the answers, your not testing what you think you're testing. (Or what you should be testing as a teacher)

The big issue is it's hard to test the actual problem solving process in math with a multiple choice exam so you're either stuck doing it in higher level classes with less people so you're not drowning in grading or clearing/removing calculators entirely. The option of just not having calculators and formulating the problems so they could be solved without them was the most common solution to that when I was in college. Usually it's relatively easy to select a set of parameters for the problem to make the solution easy to compute numerically.

I'm in the UK and there was nearly no multiple choice exams, both external and internal. Most external exams used scanning software with questions split out to make it faster to mark them. Somehow our teachers managed.

The only multiple choice exams were optional additions the school could purchase, ie: Maths Challenge, benchmarking, career advice...

In the US basically every large exam especially the end of year and college admissions tests (except the essay portion recently added to the SAT when I took it) were all bubble forms. In college it was most common in the large classes that were part of the options for the general education requirements that would use them instead of open ended questions so they could be automatically graded for the 50-100 students who'd be taking each exam. It was also way more common in classes where answers would be numerical rather than say my proofs and logic class where we needed to write out a proof. IMO it was deployed logically where multiple choice made sense it was used and classes where the path to the solution was important they'd not use it.

Used to be pretty deep into the TI calculator hacking scene, I know that there were definitely programs/firmware images out there that allowed you to fake clearing the calculator's RAM and archive, as ridiculous as it sounds. But in my high school by the point teachers were manually clearing calculators most students were resorting to cheating other ways rather than advancing the graphing calc cheating arms race.

There was a program you could run on the TI calculators before clearing that did some voodoo magic so that you could memorize some short “binary” program that restored it all. My memory is vague but between clearing and executing this very short executable, it at least appeared to be completely wiped.

IIRC it was an applet that hooked the key shortcuts and menu entries for a wipe, and the really advanced ones would drop you into an imitation shell that appeared as a freshly wiped calculator would, but there was a magic keystroke to drop back to the (untouched) main system.

Edit: found it, or a similar one: https://brandonw.net/calculators/fake/

They tried this when I was in HS, but we resisted on the grounds that our science teachers let us create programs for their classes, and if we erased the memory we'd lose those programs.

I have recently learned that the introductory calculus classes at one of our local community colleges bans the use of calculators - any calculators - entirely during exams, and the syllabus and problem sets are accordingly structured in a way that makes using calculators largely redundant.

Exactly. Made several similar ones and had a 'lock' screen that was blank until you input the right key combination, or exited otherwise.

Programming it meant I knew the content well enough to never need it.

Sure. But then you (or someone) sells that to other kids for $$$. You might not need it, but they do. All they know is how to put the question in and copy the answer, they've never even seen the code, let alone have developed it

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

> Kinda like the p2p network: the kids with the skill to set it up probably don’t need any extra help on the exams.

Thank god they can just copy the program that the smart kid wrote.

There was a 1950s/60s juvenile sci-fi story about a teenager who programmed his dad's lab computer to do his math homework. When the adults caught on to what he was doing, they decided it wasn't cheating because he had to learn the math first in order to write the program.

Blocking internet to prevent cheating is absurdly stupid as the cost to any nation's economy must be non trivial. Why can't they just take all the devices for students entering examination halls.

unless you are willing to body search every student (hundreds of thousands), you can't do that. as that would require hiring security personnel, because teachers won't agree to do it

Quite visible in Cloudflare Radar: https://radar.cloudflare.com/dz?dateRange=7d

(Disclaimer: I work on this product)

I don’t think it shows any changes on the graphs?

I must be missing something, I don't see anything in those graphs that resembles the whole country getting cut off from the rest of the Internet.

(If anything, it appears that the traffic is actually higher compared to the previous 7 days?)

If you look at last 28 days the drops are visible and annotated: https://radar.cloudflare.com/dz?dateRange=28d. And the drops link to the related blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/exam-internet-shutdowns-iraq-alg...

Disclosure, not disclaimer. (Sorry!)

As jgrahamc pointed out, it's visible on the 28 day charts, I mistakenly copied the link from a different tab than the one I was looking at, sorry!

I don't see enough commentary on the social issues behind this.

There should be no exam in which the stakes are high enough to justify those measures.

How do you propose they do college admissions then?

Perhaps they could ask the other countries that don’t turn off the entire internet.

Implement a foundational year, similar to the Ciclo Básico Común (CBC) in Argentina, my country, which all students must pass to move on to their chosen majors. This serves both as a basic foundation for all students and acts as a filter to manage the number of students who continue to the specific fields of study.

For some highly competitive fields, like medicine or law, an entrance exam is implemented. This isn't a comprehensive test like the SAT or ACT, it's specific to the field of study.

One extra year of study before beginning the major will be prohibitively expensive for the lower middle class and the poor people.

In my country's case, the colleges where the CBC is implemented are public and free for all students on the undergrad level (subsidized by taxes) and very affordable for masters/PhD.

The expense is the opportunity cost, the time spent not working for money.

You can work and go to school at the same time.

Yes, that's what I meant.

People like us are blessed to not have to hustle to earn since we are 18 yos.

But I have seen, first hand, people dropping out of really good opportunities when they have the smallest chance to earn an income.

Don't have a broken, monstrously expensive educational system?

It wouldn't need to require an extra year. The courses available in that first year could be general courses which apply to all majors.

That's a good solution, but works only for not-so-involved subjects?

If you want to study Physics, CS, etc., then, this will not possibly work.

Unless we make papers common to multiple majors.

Most countries are able to do standardized testing without shutting down the internet

Germany has a mix of (semi) standardized tests with student performance over the last two (three) years. Additionally universities are usually very lenient on acceptance (at least in engineering/science), but very harsh on failing students. (Which is a much fairer system IMO)

How come rest of the world don’t block the internet during the college admissions?

It is obviously a non-solution which exists so that you can pretend the problem is "solved", while doing nothing.

Many countries manage to do standardized (or semi-standardized) testing without shutting down the internet. When I took mine, we were in a large hall with several teacher present and had precisely the materials allowed on our tables.

Shuttibg down the internet speaks of an enormous distrust towards the test takers and high degrees of suspicion towards teachers for tolerating cheating.

Recent and related:

Algeria cuts internet nationwide during the baccalaureat exams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36285086 - June 2023 (163 comments)

Also:

Algeria turns off its internet to keep students from cheating on exams – CNN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17393923 - June 2018 (1 comment)

Algeria shuts down internet to prevent cheating during high school exams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363270 - June 2018 (4 comments)

Also—loosely related and sparsely commented:

Internet goes dark for millions in Indian state's bid to stop exam cheats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28686329 - Sept 2021 (0 comments)

Indian state cuts internet to prevent cheating in exam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28670023 - Sept 2021 (0 comments)

Exam Cheats Cited in Three-Day Internet Shutdown in Ethiopia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20180544 - June 2019 (1 comment)

Total Internet Shutdown in Ethiopia - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20163896 - June 2019 (1 comment)

Ethiopia shut down its internet to prevent exam cheating - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456234 - May 2017 (0 comments)

Iraq shuts down internet nationwide to prevent students from cheating on exams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736257 - May 2016 (0 comments)

Iraq shuts down entire country's internet to “prevent cheating” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11719094 - May 2016 (0 comments)

If cheating during exams is the major concern, then there is something really bad going on, and if blocking internet is their solution, that is a sing of what their solutions are.

Instead of treating all students like criminals, proctor exams like the rest of the civilized world. Blocking internet or mobile phone service is using a rocket launcher to squash a fly.

Or, you can go full Stanford and just trust students blindly like it's still 1891.

https://communitystandards.stanford.edu/policies-guidance/ho...

> Instead of treating all students like criminals, proctor exams

you've somehow got that completely backwards because proctoring exams means treating students like criminals

what algeria is doing is treating the entire population like students

When I lived in India I lived through scheduled power outages every day. What's the big deal?

You don't get Internet for a few hours on a single day. Who cares?

Go outside.

Why is this news? Iraq does this, Jordan does this, it's common throughout the region to block internet. It's not effective, and usually there are carveouts (office internet still works, usually it's only cellular and public internet, etc). When I was living in Iraq this was just something you dealt with, like a rolling blackout once a while.

Lots of bad things commonly happen and yet are news, since someone might be learning them for the first time.

Anyone suggesting measures that happen locally where the exams are written misses the point that in a lot of societies, there is a lot less trust in your fellow citizens to behave fairly.

Must’ve not occurred to them that if students simply looking things up is such a massive concern maybe you should test something else?

What would that be?

Edit, to make the question more clear: I considered math and physics problems which tend to be less on the memorize and more on the do-the-thinking-yourself side of things and even those are vulnerable to some whiz solving the problems for everyone and people just copying them.

None of my ideas are practical cuz I assume they believe their current system is “good enough” but anyway:

I would scrap the standardized tests that we are most accustomed to. Yes ideally we’d want some more objective way of determining a baseline level of intellect and I honestly don’t hate something like the wonderlic (specifically the speed of identifying patterns aspect). Admissions would be dependent on a short convo, which sucks but I can’t think of a better way to foster the optimal student body. Ultimately the point of the convo is to parse the extent of ones intellectual curiosity and their voracity for learning—admittedly might be harder to sniff out the bullshit in practice lol.

Really just want to admit kids with the above qualities and a min level of intelligence ie the purpose of the two hurdles. I don’t want kids that r solely motivated by external factors. Have to prioritize fostering that curiosity cuz those people are how society progresses.

Yes ik something so subjective “isn’t fair” but standardized tests actually purport as being fair and lol. And for the record I was good at them, they’re just stupid. Let me know any thoughts cuz what I said probably sounds absurd

the people in charge went with turning off the internet to the country... I'm not sure they're filled with great ideas or reasonable problem solving skills...

why is the world the way that it is :(

I wonder how much money the economy in Algeria loses due to the lack of internet during this time period

Wouldn't it be much simpler to have a "no phones" policy at testing sites?

In Asia, their high school exam calculator has no graphics calculating capabability. Vast majority of questions doable with just pen and paper and loga book without needing calculator. Heck I even heard of students having broken calculator in exam and still come out scoring A. BTW, the examinable math there are near not doable by western students until they are in their 2nd or 3rd year engineering uni/college. Everytime I see those 15-18 year olds doing math in western hemisphere tapping their fancy 200usd calculators, I always chuckle knowing they would ended up buying stuff from China and Korea with all their math done already for them. And they complained jobs being outsourced...while they actively pursue gender studies.

How does this stop cheating? I can still think of a dozen ways to get a network wirelessly.

It does not stop it, but certainly reduces it.

What are the dozen ways?

they're probably all some version of a mesh network

Not the OP, but here's half a dozen off the top of my head:

* WiFi mesh

* Cellular/LTE

* Satellite internet

* LoRa

* Bluetooth

* Ham radio sending data packets

* Walkie-talky voice communication with a few friends outside the school (probably not what the OP meant by "wireless network" but I think it's technically correct ;)

> Walkie-talky voice communication

In Brazil there's been a fairly sophisticated scheme based on that. It proceeded more or less as follows:

1) the "service provider" hired some highly specialized "candidates" who would enroll for the exam and take it

2) these fake-candidates would then quickly solve the questions, focusing only the few subject matters they were specialized in. One is usually not allowed to leave the exam room carrying the printed materials, unless they accept to wait for a specified amount of time (1 hour before the final time or so, IIRC). But these guys were able to memorize the answers and, then, simply left.

3) after leaving the room, the fake-candidates would meet a team in a car nearby. They had a radio transmitter there, and started to broadcast the answers.

4) the cheaters who hired the "service" would carry a radio receiver with a tiny earpiece implanted under their skins. They would then listen to the answers and write them down

I don't remember how did they find that out. I believe it happened when an exam proctor suspected about a candidate answering the questions too quickly.

But you wont have access to wikipedia without more work, and definitely wont have google.

You can, but most students can't. It still doesn't excuse the stupidity of a nationwide ban though.

Sure, most of us here can, but is that also true of the average cheater in a baccalaureate exam?

Before answering, consider this survey result: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

That was a fascinating read that terrified me.

Blocking the internet, if done well, makes it very difficult to get mass distribution quickly. If it's only a few people that manage to get communications working, cheating becomes a minor issue instead of a major issue. I don't agree with the tradeoffs chosen, but it sort of makes sense.

Without being there to see the exact shape of the blocking, it's hard to know if you could get mass distribution through a phone tree system, but if you could, you'd likely leave a huge trail through telco billing.

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