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Comment by donmcronald | Hacker News Reader

That's crazy because I imagine cheating is trivial for those that want to do it. All you would need is a clean install, an HDMI splitter, and a tiny earbud stuffed in your ear. Then someone in an adjacent room can feed you answers.

Even if they start making people put their ears up to the camera, that won't help much. Bone conducting headphones built into the arms of glasses will be virtually undetectable. Do you ban glasses? That won't help. I just tried putting my bone conducting headphones against my upper jawbone inside my mouth and they work fine at 30% volume. How do you prevent that?

What's the endgame? Do we end up with everyone completely hairless, naked, and forced to expose every orifice for the digital proctor?

The education industry is becoming satire. Bring back common sense IMO.

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It's practically impossible to defeat cheating on a technical front with their current design. Anti-cheating methods strike me as depending on emotions: I can probably find a way to cheat successfully but, if my future depends on it, my fear will make my body language stick out like a sore thumb. I also wouldn't do it to begin with since it's unlikely to have a better EV than putting the same effort into studying, especially if I actually need the knowledge in the future, or if there are social repercussions. Some won't have this hurdle but the combination of 'needing to cheat' and 'being skilled enough to get away with it' is rare.

The big problem is when cheating is so easy and widespread that everyone knows it. Then it becomes the low friction path. This would explain what I've heard about some Indian school exams.

There are probably a lot of people doing minor cheating and a few people doing major cheating. In most cases, it's not enough to undermine the reputation of the qualification.

Oh, it's the same shape as the fraud problem that's popular here:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

The problem is that the people who imagine cheating aren’t asking anyone technical how they would cheat. They mostly target imagined methods of cheating.

Cheating in online games is big business and is accessible to more than the technically inclined through purchase. There's no reason to think the same won't happen for tests that have actual monetary value.

> just tried putting my bone conducting headphones against my upper jawbone inside my mouth and they work fine at 30% volume.

Which brand.... and how drool proof are they over an hour long test?

Shokz. They are not waterproof AFAIK.

oh shit that is a good idea

The point isn’t to stop all cheating, it’s to catch the most blatant idiots cheating.

That’s really all that’s required.

Not good enough because the stakes are high for admissions, that is if they still choose to look at merit.

   The point isn’t to stop all cheating, it’s to catch the most blatant idiots cheating.

What? No the point is to catch all cheaters.

Catching all cheaters is impossible for any reasonable amount of cash spent (remember all the possibilities people came up for that chess thing?) - which means they want to reduce cheating to a level that is acceptable.

Things they're not doing that could allow some high-level cheating:

* DNA analysis

* Full body searches

* Faraday cages

they could record the person taking the test with a video camera at the test site and make it much harder to cheat

It will just catch the dumbest and most people will cheat successfully. Just catching the most blarant and naive is stupid when the alternative of people being supervised in a physical room means there is next to no cheating at all.

The point is to provide a meaningful metric schools can use to determine how likely a student is to succeed at their University, and how much success they are likely to achieve.

Bad or average cheaters are unlikely to find success. Maybe great cheaters are likely to find success.

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