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Education Toys Technology Hardware

New Smartwatches Allow Students To Cheat On Exams 394

Posted by timothy from the naked-testing-centers-on-the-way dept.
HughPickens.com writes: The Independent reports that smartwatches that allow students to cheat on exams are being openly sold on Amazon. An advert for one such watch, called a "New 2016 Student 8GB cheating watch," is offered on Amazon for $51.68. "This watch is specifically designed for cheating on exams with a special programmed software. It is perfect for covertly viewing exam notes directly on your wrist, by storing text and pictures in the 8GB memory storage. It supports various file formats, such as: TXT, MP3, JPG, GIF, WAV, WMV, AVI, etc. It has an emergency button, so when you press it — the watch's screen display changes from text to a regular clock, and blocks all other buttons." The watch has garnered good reviews. "this is amazing. it helps me cheat on my test and it is smart and i never got caught," writes one reviewer. Joe Sidders, the deputy head at Monkton Combe senior school, in Bath, told BBC News that such devices were making exams a "nightmare to administer". "I expect the hidden market for these sorts of devices is significant, and this offering on Amazon is just the tip of the iceberg." A spokesman for Amazon said the company did not want to comment on the sale of the cheating watches. But professors are striking back. "My microbiology professor does a watch check every time we have a test," says Abigail Lauze. "If it's not an old school analog it has to come off and go in the cell phone bin."
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New Smartwatches Allow Students To Cheat On Exams

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  • Ok, so... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mrsam ( 12205 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @01:38PM (#51660375) Homepage

    ... New exam rule: no wearing of wristwatches, of any kind, while taking an exam. You want to know the time left? See this big clock on the wall. This solution seems too obvious. Am I missing something?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      Yes, you're missing reading the summary.

    • Re:Ok, so... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by khasim ( 1285 ) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @01:41PM (#51660405)

      Nope. Looks like you got it. Even from the summary:

      But professors are striking back. "My microbiology professor does a watch check every time we have a test," says Abigail Lauze. "If it's not an old school analog it has to come off and go in the cell phone bin."

      Sounds good. Every student gets a bag. Puts his/her name on it. Then puts ALL of his/her electronics into the bag. They can be reclaimed AFTER the test ON THEIR WAY OUT OF THE CLASSROOM.

      • Re:Ok, so... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SumDog ( 466607 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @01:50PM (#51660481) Homepage Journal

        That was in that move Paper Planes ...in reality, parents would lose their collective shift if a teach went around taking up everyone $200 ~ $500 smartphones.

        • Standard procedure at my sons school, phones go into the basket on way into class.

        • Re:Ok, so... (Score:4, Informative)

          by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:29PM (#51660775) Homepage

          That's what happens in my son's middle school. Kids are allowed to have smartphones, but can't have them out during school. If they are caught with a smartphone out, it's confiscated and the parent needs to come to collect it. The reason for requiring the parent to collect it is to make it a bigger offense than just "oh well, I got caught texting in class. I'll just get it before I leave." The students recognize that Offense Requiring Parental Involvement is much more serious and are therefore much more likely to stay within the rules.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

          Alternative solution for asshole parents; make the kids leave their $500 smartphone at home on exam days.

        • nah, everybody has a book bag, phones, watches electronics go into your book bag. if i see a phone out and you haven't turned in your test yet, you lose all the points.

      • Dating myself, but we had the same issues with calculators when they became programmable. I know a guy who cheated with his HP J7 (I think that was the model) because it knew all the physics formulas, all he had to do was plug numbers in the right boxes. It was obvious to the professors what happened because he never showed anything on paper except for the right answer. Calculators were banned the next semester, but the class provided a couple of the old simple models for those who really needed them.

        In

        • Re:deja vu (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Ambassador Kosh ( 18352 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:58PM (#51660977)

          Instead rewrite the test so that aids like this don't help.

          Make the test assuming students have access to pretty much all information and make the test about actual understanding of the material. If a test can be trivialized due to cheating it is a bad test to begin with.

          The math test sounds like an example of a good test, same for my engineering exams. 95% or so of the points where for defining all the equations, knowns, unknowns, make sure there where enough equations for all the unknowns, showing the understanding of the problem etc. and 5% was for actually solving the problem. As it stands today humans define problems, computers solve them and humans interpret the results and make sure they are sane.

          I have encountered so many students from a calculus class that could solve a math problem if given to them in the notation used in the class but given a word problem where they had to define the actual equation and then evaluate if the answer was reasonable they where completely lost. In real life you have to define the equation yourself and also figure out if the answer is reasonable and schools almost never teach that part and memorization does NOT help with those problems.

        • My geometry teacher tried to fail me for only writing the answers. But since I didn't use a calculator, she couldn't. She found out I could memorize the textbook if I wanted, so remembering the formulas and procedures was easy.

      • and is the school willing to pay for any damage / theft costs?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

          If the kid is willing to take that risk by taking the device to school during an exam knowing it will have to be put aside during the exam , then "no" is the correct answer.

          Personal responsibility is a lesson that should have be taught by parents far before costly smartphones/-watches ever become an issue.

    • Yeah, a lot.

      1)A respect for privacy and personal rights.

      2) The incredible stupid belief that the problem is wrist watches and phones, rather than all technology.

      3) Any understanding of the prevalence of electronic media and communication techniques as used by the people that cheat casinos.

      Your basic problem is that you think you can eliminate cheating by outlawing specific methods. People can come up with more ideas on how to cheat quicker than you can outlaw them.

    • ... New exam rule: no wearing of wristwatches, of any kind, while taking an exam.

      This is a subject matter screen. If having the answers on your wrist gets you an A on the test, the subject matter is trivial and unnecessary or you made an awful test. After getting through general electives, every single course I took was open book, open computer, open neighbor (if you wanted to dick the curve) and were still so damned hard people left in tears.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zlives ( 2009072 )

        if the answer is not in the book, or computer or neighbor... then your teacher is just a sadistic asshole.

        • Tough open book tests (Score:5, Informative)

          by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:10PM (#51660629)

          if the answer is not in the book, or computer or neighbor... then your teacher is just a sadistic asshole.

          Not at all. I've taken tests that were 100% open book BUT if you had to spend a lot of time looking stuff up you were going to fail the test due to time constraints. The point of open book tests is to avoid needlessly penalizing folks for forgetting some minor bit of trivia or a formula. It's not supposed to be a substitute for actually learning the material.

          • Exactly, open book tests are meant to simulate (in a fashion) the real world where you have access to all manner of reference material to do your job but you need to have enough familiarity with the subject to know where to look and what you are looking for.

          • I've taken tests that were 100% open book BUT if you had to spend a lot of time looking stuff up you were going to fail the test due to time constraints. The point of open book tests is to avoid needlessly penalizing folks for forgetting some minor bit of trivia or a formula. It's not supposed to be a substitute for actually learning the material.

            Open book tests are extremely inefficient. They're noisy (everyone turning pages) and slow (finding that obscure equation in 100 pages of material takes time), ev

      • The problem is that phones/watches can be used to communicate. So snap a photo of the test, transmit it to your paid accomplice, who completes the exam and sends the answers back. You get an A+ while having no understanding of the subject matter. So the only difference in grades will depend on how much you can afford to spend on your test taker.

    • Re:Ok, so... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @01:53PM (#51660513)

      This solution seems too obvious.

      Yes the solution is obvious. How about not judging people on the ability to remember useless facts in a 90 minute window of opportunity under conditions they will never experience in real life, and then giving them a mark that will affect them in real life.

      I've been in industry for 20 years now. No one has asked me to perform long division on paper. No one has asked me to solve a laplace transform without a calculator. No one has asked me to sit in silence for 20 minutes reciting things from memory. No one has forced me to solve some kind of hard problem without the ability to go get some reference material.

      All of that is quite good since I really didn't perform well on exams, and found myself lucky to be at a university and do courses where you're merits are determined on work output rather than rote memorisation and a 90minute stress test.

      • Re:Ok, so... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by tnk1 ( 899206 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:01PM (#51660571)

        This solution seems too obvious.

        No one has asked me to sit in silence for 20 minutes reciting things from memory. No one has forced me to solve some kind of hard problem without the ability to go get some reference material.

        You got off pretty easily in your interviews, I guess. Every third interview, I get some dipshit who thinks that they need to have me write code under a time deadline without reference materials or adequate tools. I get it, there are some geniuses out there who can do that. And I can't blame them for wanting to hire such people, but I'd consider that to be an escalation challenge, not the first question.

        Mind you, I can pull it off sometimes. I always was good at test taking. What I hate is that people actually use that method and waste people's time. It's a weed out method, and a bad one at that. I've never worked with someone who needs to win a speed coding contest to do their job.

        • Remember that HR people and recruiters are the ones who didn't pass the tests and want to take it out on you. If they knew how to do that shit they'd be too valuable to waste time on hiring.

          • HR people and recruiters

            These are not typically the people setting the questions. You know you're sitting an exam a HR person set when you're type tested for personality as part of your interview.

        • Re:Ok, so... (Score:4)

          by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @03:07PM (#51661041)

          I'm not in programming. I've been asked to solve some engineering problems in interviews but most of them have been breadth of knowledge / innovative solutions type of exercises. And heck most of the time the best answer is not necessarily replying by memory.

          In my current job at the interview I got asked a question about severe service valves for oil and gas. The questions was what valve to select for a really high pressure differential service to avoid cavitation. My answer? "Don't know. It has something to do with the trim. I wasn't the one who specified them in my last job. But if I had to select one there's a few places I can find out for example the Fischer control valve engineering handbook, existing valves throughout similar services, or ask a more experienced engineer."

          I was told that was the "right" answer even though I had no idea how to answer the question. So some questions may look like rote learning type questions on the face of it but actually have some deeper thought in it.

          I've also heard of colleagues of mine who set design questions in their interviews. The correct answer has nothing to do with the design that ends up on paper, but the order in which the person draws or starts scribbling on the paper, looking at method rather than the result.

      • It's about learning to think (Score:5, Insightful)

        by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:19PM (#51660687)

        I've been in industry for 20 years now. No one has asked me to perform long division on paper.

        And did you think the purpose of doing it on paper was the end goal? If so you completely missed the point. The purpose was to help you actually learn what is happening in a fundamental way AND to practice arithmetic in the process. I learned long division in the third grade. Doing it by hand helped my brain develop and it taught me lots about math beyond simply a process to do division. The point is to learn to think and hopefully you learn some math along the way.

        No one has asked me to solve a laplace transform without a calculator.

        But if they had simply handed you a calculator with it programmed in then you would never have learned it in the first place. I see that routinely in students I have tutored. The ones that simply whip out the calculator immediately struggle to learn what is actually going on and they almost invariably do worse than those students who slog through it by hand and actually learn the material.

        No one has asked me to sit in silence for 20 minutes reciting things from memory.

        Really? I do a version of that every day in my job. I have all sorts of things I do from memory and I'm pretty sure you do too if you think about it.

        No one has forced me to solve some kind of hard problem without the ability to go get some reference material.

        What are you going to do when there is no reference material? If every problem you solve has a reference available for it then you are doing nothing but solving trivial problems.

        • And did you think the purpose of doing it on paper was the end goal?

          We're talking about setting exams, not about the process of learning. Long division is important to learn. Judging you by your ability to do it under pressure with no reference material is not.

          Really? I do a version of that every day in my job. I have all sorts of things I do from memory and I'm pretty sure you do too if you think about it.

          Wow you can keep your job. If your job is like sitting an exam every day and you enjoy it, more power to you. No I spend my time at my job solving problems. This often involves technical discussions, reading papers, running simulations, not sitting in silence tapping my pen at my teeth while sweating with a person sta

        • Re:It's about learning to think (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Obfuscant ( 592200 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @04:24PM (#51661635)

          But if they had simply handed you a calculator with it programmed in then you would never have learned it in the first place.

          This. And you would not have learned when it was appropriate to use and when it was not. I have two examples to make this point.

          The first was when I was a TA and a student asked to borrow my calculator for a quiz. I told him it was an HP and asked if he knew how to use it. Sure, he said. So I loaned it to him. One of the answers he turned in was "1.00". This was for the concentration of hydrogen ions in a buffer solution of a weak acid. At some point he had pressed "number enter number enter divide", adding an extra "enter" and thus dividing the second number by itself. This is a common error, and meant nothing, really. But here's the problem: his answer showed me that he knew the equations but had no grasp on the concept of "weak acid" or "buffer solution", or of pH in general, since his answer was about six orders of magnitude wrong.

          Several years earlier I had been a student in the same class. We had a quiz problem about pKa and ... hydrogen ion concentrations in buffer solutions. There are two different equations you can use to solve this. One is short, simple, and requires an approximation. The other is longer, more complicated, and doesn't. If you just hand someone both equations, you can guess they'll pick the easier one because it's easier, but they'll never learn about the assumption it requires and they'll get the wrong answer. Every time. This tendency to pick the shorter one is so strong that the TA had automatically used the wrong equation when creating the quiz key and he marked my answer, using the long form, wrong. And then I got to point out that the assumption was invalid and my answer was, indeed, the correct one.

          Tests to determine mastery of concepts aren't always testing things you're going to do in a direct way in adult life. And even for long division, yes, there have been times when I want to figure something out and don't have a calculator at hand to do the division. I consider the lack of ability of the common person to do simple math like this to be one of the losses of civilization. Even just having to fumble for a calculator when you want to split a check three ways -- that's ridiculous.

          If every problem you solve has a reference available for it then you are doing nothing but solving trivial problems.

          Not necessarily, but he's going to waste an awful lot of time having to look things up while other people remember stuff and can synthesize new and better things without spending days looking all the details up. His more productive co-workers will get the raises; he'll get to visit the technical library. Yes, I love the fact I can pull out the Perl Quick Reference to refresh myself on perl commands, but it sure does make writing the code a lot slower. And when I learned 68000 assembly language, I got a lot more productive at it as I memorized what the instructions did and didn't have to look up every one every time.

    • Re:Ok, so... (Score:5, Funny)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:29PM (#51660769)

      ... New exam rule: no wearing of wristwatches, of any kind, while taking an exam.

      Think of the failed terrorist attacks: the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the tampon bomber . . .

      At the PolygamousRanch University, all our students are required to wear no clothes at all when taking exams.

      In the buff, or no credit, is our motto.

      Our University charges no tuition. We just sell videos of exams, to cover our costs.

    • Yup, you're "missing" that everyone wants to over-engineer a solution and instead bike-shed every last detail.

      Silly you for having a simple, practical solution! :-)

    • Rigorous testing centers have banned all watches for a long time (although, without your watch, how would you know?). Smartwatches just make it easier to explain to people why they are banned.

    • It's hardly a new problem with watches either. I had to take off my calculator watch for math tests in elementary school in the 80s.

    • My solution if I am a professor is to simply to allow open book, or at least open note. That reduces the incentive to use a smartwatch or other 'banned' resource, as it doesn't provide an advantage, since other students will have pretty much the same tools at hand.

      It's absolutely possible to design an open-book test that will still be challenging or impossible to those who are unprepared. If you are only testing student's ability to memorize rote facts and formulae that can easily be looked up, then yo

    • While the advertising for this watch is truly disgusting, it seems really likely to only hamper lazy teachers who focus on meaningless memorization rather than comprehension. The watch doesn't do any real kind of good cheating, like let you access the Internet or other students. It just serves as a place to keep your krib sheets. And from the advertisement quote that I used in my title, I suspect the quality isn't very good either. Life is an open book test, school tests should be open book to and focus mo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Or design an exam that can't be cheated on.... it's quite possible. Ever had an "open book" exam? They tend to be the hardest exams because they require thought instead of memorizing facts and notes. But they're hard to prepare, and teachers are lazy.

  • in stannum veritas (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @01:42PM (#51660409)

    Everyone on the internet laughed when I started Tinfoil University, where every lecture hall and, indeed, every room is a Faraday cage. But who's laughing now?

    Seriously, I'm asking. For some reason, my smartphone doesn't get a very good signal anymore, which severely limits my ability to keep track of who's laughing about what on the internet these days.

    • one flaw in your perfect plan: This watch as 8 GB of memory.More than enough to store an indexed table of any textbook I know.
  • To be clear, it isn't Amazon that is promoting this watch, it's a company calling themselves "MKSD". The amazon employees should exercise a little more quality control in their submissions as this is going to mar their corporate image big time.

  • Well written exams... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by VAXcat ( 674775 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @01:47PM (#51660457)
    If it's a well written exam, access to 8GB of cheating info wouldn't help...

    • There's a catch 22. You either make an exam easy enough to remember and disallow all notes, in which cased 8GB would definitely help, or you make the exam really test your skills rather than rely on memory in which case you're likely to have an open book exam anyway making the entire topic moot.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Aaden42 ( 198257 )

        What???!!! An exam that actually tests whether you can think and apply your knowledge to solve problems rather than mindlessly reguritate disconnected facts from a text book or lecture? Sweet Finagle, what will they think of next????

        Seriously, any test you can “cheat” on with notes is likely useless. There are very few real-world situations in which it’s necessary to vomit up facts on command without consulting any kind of reference. The medical field is probably one of the few excepti

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )

      Exactly. In many of the exams I took, it wasn't so much that calculators and the like weren't allowed, they weren't even really needed.

      For example, in trigonometry class they generally presented problems in terms of a unit circle, i.e. a circle with a diameter of 1. Makes many of the arithmetic operations easy enough that you can do them in your head, or at least on paper. But you were required to show all steps of your work, so if you didn't understand the basic principles then the "easy" problems didn't h

  • Exams should be open-book anyway (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @01:47PM (#51660461)

    Exams which test memorization are pointless. Better to make them problem-solving based, challenging and open-book. That way cheaters will still do poorly. It's more a problem of lazy exam creators than anything.

    • Re:Exams should be open-book anyway (Score:5, Insightful)

      by paulpach ( 798828 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:20PM (#51660697)

      Exams which test memorization are pointless. Better to make them problem-solving based, challenging and open-book. That way cheaters will still do poorly. It's more a problem of lazy exam creators than anything.

      I would agree 100% with you if we are talking about math, programming, physics, etc... On these subjects I am all for open book tests.

      But if you are talking about history or anatomy, well, the entire subject is about memorization.

      • Re:Exams should be open-book anyway (Score:4, Insightful)

        by idontgno ( 624372 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:34PM (#51660809) Journal

        But if you are talking about history or anatomy, well, the entire subject is about memorization.

        Well, you forget that as this is Slashdot, the basement-dwelling shoe-gazing trogs don't think those subjects should be taught or tested either, because TECHNOLOGY!.

      • “Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.” Edmund Burke, History teacher.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cyn1c77 ( 928549 )

        Exams which test memorization are pointless. Better to make them problem-solving based, challenging and open-book. That way cheaters will still do poorly. It's more a problem of lazy exam creators than anything.

        I would agree 100% with you if we are talking about math, programming, physics, etc... On these subjects I am all for open book tests.

        But if you are talking about history or anatomy, well, the entire subject is about memorization.

        The GPs point was that those subjects are perceived to be that way because of lazy teaching.

        History is as much about interpretation of past events and its application to present/future events as it is about simply memorizing facts. Anatomy is about memorizing details to be able to instantly apply those details to a patient's problem.

        Unfortunately, many profs choose to simply test for the memorized details because they are easier to grade. But that approach can result in less critical thinking from the stu

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        If the test is to check how well you've memorized facts, then the student who has to look them up on his smartwatch will be slower at completing the test than the one who has all the facts in her head. So a simple solution for memorization tests is to set an appropriate time limit that weeds out the cheaters.

  • So...this is for kids too stupid to use a tiny piece of paper and a 0.5m mechanical pencil? Cause that solution costs $5 and has worked for decades.

  • I don't get why memorization is still so important in exams. If there are commonly available tools that allow you to get the correct answer in the allotted time, what is the problem with that? Sure, there are things you will simply have to have memorized, but if you have to take the time to look those up, you will simply run out of time in a well designed exam. My best prof's exams were open book, open door. You could head to the library during the exam if you wanted. Of course, if you did, you would n
  • One design flaw with this cheaters watch: It's the BIGGEST watch I've seen in YEARS. It looks like a toy and it draws attention to itself. you walk in with this big bulky black square no your wrist and people's eyes are drawn to it...either to laugh at the most awkward watch made in since the old calculator watches in the 70's/80's, or to wonder why anyone would wear such a bulky watch in the first place. Guaranteed to get noticed by profs everyone (and most of your friends too...)

    • Not to mention, you likely have to interact with the watch in some way to get to the information you need to cheat on the test. The professor might notice you repeatedly tapping and swiping on your Definitely-Not-A-Giant-Cheating-Smartwatch. About the only thing I can think of to make it more obvious is require voice commands. "Watch, what is the square root of 64 divided by 2 cubed?"

    • Even the Timex "calculator/pda" watches were much smaller and that was three decades ago.

  • kicked out and called to the principle/director whoever is sitting on top, maybe penalized just for possession of such a watch because it implies intended fraud.
    Good luck!

  • India style (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:22PM (#51660707)

    Do it like India showed us last week, all exams are do be done in swimming gear, preferably on glass desks.

  • Really I want one if I can get an SDK for it. Not to cheat but to write my own apps for it.
    $50 and a nice big screen is kind of cool.

  • I remember one class (HS, circa 1990) where we had to "clear the EEPROMs" on our TI-85s because somebody was caught with their notes all typed in, which must have taken longer than actually studying.

    We made a program that emulated the flash process without doing anything, right down to the cursor blinking for the right count etc. We had too many useful programs that we didn't want to lose, like one called "SuperFactor!" which could do up to 4th order polynomial factoring...

  • According to ray kurzweil, we are going to have memory nanites injected into our brains next year! The singularity is coming in 2 years. I'm not as optimistic as ray, but it does seem like the tech to look up the entirety of human knowledge is eventually going to be inextricably linked to the human taking the test. We should probably start planning for that.

    Maybe the skills of the future have more to do with using tech to access information than filling your head. I try to think things through for myself

  • Unless the degree aimed for is worthless in itself (a far to common occurrence these days), the only effect this has is students hurting their own skills. And once you have an aural exam or an advanced exam that requires actual understanding, that will come back to bite the cheaters.

  • If you can cram enough information into a watch to help you with the test, then that sounds more like a problem with the test -- students should be allowed to bring any materials they want with them into the exam.

    If an exam question relies on rote memorization of some fact, formula, or theorem, that question doesn't belong on the test since in the real world the student will have access to Google for those trivia questions.

    The exam should test how well students can apply these facts to solve problems, not o

  • Then good luck passing my interview process.

    (why do you keep squinting at your watch? you're supposed to be writing source on this white board to perform Boolean operations on quad tree)

  • Teachers tend to rely more on behavior than whatever gadget students use to cheat.
    These smart watches are not that different from regular cheat sheets in the way they are used. And while they store more data than a piece of paper, that's actually a trap for the cheating student. No one expects you to learn 8GB of stuff, which means that the watch will be filled with useless data the cheater will have to sort through in less than ideal conditions.

  • The solution (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HuguesT ( 84078 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @02:45PM (#51660899)

    The solution is to design exams so that having a cheating watch is of no help. Open-book exams are the best. Disclaimer: I'm a prof, all my exams are open-book. If you didn't study beforehand, the textbook is of little help.

  • I know this probably sounds strange but I fully support things like this existing.

    The reason people use them and the reason they help on exams is many exams are 100% memorization based. EVERYTHING that students can do to fight back against those kinds of exams should be done. There is really no way to justify a memorization based exam existing anymore. Memorization is something humans are getting worse at physically due to changes in the brain.

    Your brain basically has X neural cells and it can change what i

  • Who has the time to comb through page after page on their watch to find an answer? Unless the test is relatively short or the user only needs to jog his memory on one or two questions there's no way you'd have the time to do this.

    Back when I was in school most of my teachers gave us either one page of paper or a note card that we could use as a 'cheat sheet'. I used to fill it up with all kinds of formulas and equations, but rarely actually looked at it during the exam because hunting for the info took

  • A quote comes to mind. (Score:3)

    by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Tuesday March 08, 2016 @03:19PM (#51661133)

    The Alcalde's gaze was impassive. "The 'unaided skills' test, Miss Washington. There is nothing whatsoever _naked_ about it."
                  "It might as well be, Mister." Patsy was speaking in English now, and with none of the light mocking tone that made her a minor queen in her clique. It was her image and voice, but the words and body language were very un-Patsy. Juan probed the external network traffic. There was lots of it, but mostly simple query/response stuff, like you'd expect. A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie's remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington -- at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn't much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy's father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn't have to talk to him in person. Patsy's image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. "In fact," she continued, "it's worse than naked. All their lives, these -- we -- have had civilization around us. We're damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk."
                  "We are putting no one at risk ... Miss Washington." Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. "We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We're not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments -- without networks, even without computers."
                  "Next you'll be teaching rock-chipping!" said Patsy.
                  The Alcalde ignored the interruption. "Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can't, we have not properly educated them!" He paused, glared all around the room. "But this is no survivalist school. We're not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen -- perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you'll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity."

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