Catching Exam Cheats With a Spectrum Analyzer 210
angry tapir writes "Police in Taiwan have used a set of spectrum analyzers to catch at least three people suspected of cheating on an exam by monitoring them for mobile phone signals. Officers used three FSH4 analyzers specially configured by the German manufacturer Rohde & Schwarz to monitor an exam in south Taiwan for prospective government workers."
Great Spectrum Analyzer (Score:3)
I use the FSH4 at work - nice little SA - interesting use for it.
Re:Great Spectrum Analyzer (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I have a FSH8 (which is closely related to the FSH4 but goes to 8GHz) in my office and it's a really nicely designed peice of kit. It's light, the controls are responsive and well designed, the dyamic range is good (at least compared to the anritsu I don't have anything else to compare it too).
Much nicer to use than the anritsu MS2036A we have.
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If they are using windows they have hidden it very well. Could well be a winCE base or so though (afaict wince can be made to look pretty much however the device vendor likes).
Good! (Score:2)
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TFA says it caught them cheating. It didn't say they were disqualified. For all we know, cheating may have been a prerequisite for a gov't job.
Re:Good! (Score:4)
- A. Millbarge
Exams in other cultures (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Exams in other cultures (Score:5, Interesting)
I know a teacher who, after repeatedly warning against cheating in his class, was fired for daring to catch his students cheating in class. The students lost face, you see, and the teacher (not the students' cheating) was identified as the cause of the problem. True story.
It's very believable. I just started working in a university in Malaysia. At the start, I found from my colleagues about the pervasiveness of cheating and plagiarism in the university. However, since I found that there was very little guard against cheating, I believed that the students just thought that they would lose out if they do not cheat. That is, the system is at fault here rather than the students.
Hence, I designed my courses to make copying and cheating difficult.
It didn't take long for me to realize that my style of teaching totally bombed on the students. Many did not like it at all. They believed that what I did was "destroying their future" (-exact words they wrote in my evaluation), and they went to the dean to complain about this "most stupid lecturer they have ever seen" (-exact words). Yet another student commented, "you think you are in US or Japan, but this is malaysia" (-exact words).
True story. I only hope that after a few generations, things will start to change.
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In Ancient China, imperial exam [wikipedia.org] was literally game-changing. The stake is high; it was virtually the only way peasants could become noblemen. Therefore, people did whatever it took to be successful. This system was copied and adapted to some degree in ancient Japan, Korea, or Vietnam. Hence similar attitude also pervades in these countries.
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I just finished giving my exams in a foreign culture (I teach at a university in Beijing). My experience is different, but that may be because the college I teach for specifically prepares students for going overseas for graduate school. Not only am I encouraged to identify cheaters, I am given a bonus for catching anyone cheating. In spite of the fact that the rooms can be cold, putting one's hands into pockets to warm them up is considered an indication of cheating, even if after the fact it is shown t
Re:Exams in other cultures (Score:4, Interesting)
It's hard to explain really, but it involves face and the assumption of entitlement. If you've gotten to the exam stage, it's just a formality to pass the test, and preventing you from doing so is assumed to be contrary to societal norms. I'm not the OP of course, but I too have spent time outside the west, and proctored a few exams. What the OP relates is accurate. We had some discussions about ethics in one class, and the students were utterly mystified by the western attitude towards cheating. The best students in the class asked how the top-graded students could abandon their lesser classmates like that. If you have the knowledge and you refuse to share it with everyone, you're seen as being very arrogant and greedy. These are students who will walk up to a student being questioned and hit them on both sides of the face, grab their chin, and say to the teacher "see - he's stupid. Don't ask him questions, we need to help him." This, by the way, is how students pass the TOEFL in asia to get into U.S. universities, despite any lack of technical skills. This is why the GRE is useless for foreigners (perfectly acceptable to text and look up things on wikipedia during administration). And, incidentally, it is why all the great math scores that come out of standardized testing in Asian tiger nations showing an achievement gap are utterly baseless and useless as a comparative measure. The scores are of the top students, and all the other scores are the lesser students copying answers from the top students. The teachers actively promote cheating in most public, non-IB schools, as well as at the university level. They brazenly cheat from the youngest ages because there is no corollary to our ethical prohibition.
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Where particularly are you talking about? I'd appreciate your experience of a specific country or two, but I can't believe that you have wide enough experience to generalise about the entire world outside the west.
Re:Exams in other cultures (Score:5, Insightful)
Good! (Score:4, Interesting)
Catch more of them!
I'm sick of the widespread mentality that cheating is not only desirable but necessary, and that if done for the purpose of "getting ahead", it's alright. I sure wouldn't want a doctor or a lawyer who cheated their way through. I want one who took every test honestly and demonstrated they actually learned the material.
Maybe if we put back the concept of "Cheat or lie (as an adult) once, career suicide for good", we could eliminate this crap. It's infected everything from police to politicians, and programmers to paramedics. If we can find better ways to ensure people actually know what the hell they're doing, instead of demonstrating they can read letters from a cheat sheet, good.
Though, part of the blame also lies with those who design the tests. Multiple choice and fill in the blank tests are obsolete. The best tests would give the taker a project to do, and should be made difficult enough that collaboration is allowed and encouraged. After all, in real world scenarios, collaboration and the ability to research are important skills at nearly everything. As an alternative, one could at the very least give essay questions that would require careful thought and don't have a single "right answer" that can be copied in.
Of course, that takes more effort to grade than running a bunch of sheets through a reader. Imagine that, giving something actual thought.
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Maybe if we put back the concept of "Cheat or lie (as an adult) once, career suicide for good", we could eliminate this crap.
Or more likely, we'd end up with a ton of people being framed for it, and the weasels getting to the top more quickly.
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Corruption is a serious issue.
A lot of classes don't teach for understanding. They may try it but if you memorize it enough you can fake understanding by simply reciting everything. Then you promptly forget these things. Perhaps if failing didn't mean we students would have to change majors or drop out with nothing to show for our $50k in debt things might change. Of course there will always be the people that do as little as possible and harass others for the answers..when I was a freshman in college I
Re:Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of classes don't teach for understanding. They may try it but if you memorize it enough you can fake understanding by simply reciting everything.
It's true, you have to do a bit more work yourself, but a lot of classes cover things which can be understood in an integrated way. It's just that it sometimes takes a lot of random fact-memorizing to get to that point. You may think you understand integral calculus because you get the concepts, but you don't really understand it until you've been forced to memorize a dozen or so techniques of integration. You need to have them memorized and practiced because, if you don't, no formula sheet is going to help you identify which one is relevant to the given formula.
Now, whether classes do a good job of measuring understanding is another thing, and it could certainly be improved. But I've never let a bad class or a bad instructor get in the way of learning something I need to know.
Perhaps if failing didn't mean we students would have to change majors or drop out with nothing to show for our $50k in debt things might change.
So change majors, or don't fail. I don't really see what this has to do with the school, though. It sucks, but speaking from experience, it's far better than lowering standards.
I speak from experience. I wasn't really ready for college, and managed to fail all but one class my freshman year. I dropped out, and my parents made it very clear: They'd support me if I was getting an education, but if I wasn't, they wouldn't. I got a job and moved out.
A few years supporting myself in the Real World has given me a lot of perspective.
So when my last job evaporated (entire company went under, crushed by the economy), I collected unemployment for awhile, then decided I may as well be doing something useful while I collect unemployment, so I went to a local community college. I took a full term (trimester), participated in a competition and a club, had plenty of time to relax, and got straight A's.
Then I petitioned to get back into my original four-year university. It's much harder to get back if you've been dismissed for academic reasons than to get in the first time, but my awesome time at the community college probably said something. My first semester back, I was in four clubs, including a martial art (Hapkido). I moved from white belt to orange belt, and got straight A's.
That was last spring.
I had an internship last summer (still technically a freshman!), and last semester (also still technically a freshman!), I did pretty much all of the same things, plus I was a TA for a course I'd taken the semester before. Only two bad things happened: I got too busy for Hapkido for awhile, and I got one A-. The other three courses, I got A's. That brings me from a 0.6 GPA when I first came back to above 3.0.
I am loving every minute of it. I'm actually understanding stuff. I'm actually putting the work in. I'm being challenged, and I'm rising to the challenge. (I'm not really learning humility particularly well, at least not tonight...) I can actually appreciate what I'm being taught -- I can cut through the bullshit, I can do the tedious grunt work (and quickly!), and I can get at the heart of what I'm supposed to be learning, and it's beautiful.
If I had been allowed to pass with how badly I did? I'd have sat on my ass and played video games. I'd have coasted through as long as I could manage, then end up at some cushy sysadmin job, at least as long as those last. In fact, that's more or less the trajectory I was on throughout high school, but high school let me get away with it -- which is why I was so fucked up my first year of college.
As it is, I'm seriously considering grad school. Even if I don't, I'm setting myself up to have pretty much any tech job I want when I graduate -- and even the bad classes are fun while I'm here. It's not easy to describe how dramatically different my life is because
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I've presented homework projects, along with a critique of the list of answers I noticed the TA left lying in the study area, and carefully did expanded work to show that I'd personally masterd the material and gone beyond those answers. It was very embarassing to the TA, who should never have been hired, but also embarassing to the professor because my paper was presented to the class as a whole as part of a surprise presentation program, and as soon as I presented the copy of the list of answers, I was ki
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Projects are great, but collaboration in a test is silly. It's true that later in your career, you'll be asked to work in a team, BUT you will still be expected to know all your material, not just a tiny part of it.
If people collaborate on answering a test, then the result won't be a comprehensive check of what they know, it will only show at best how good they are at
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> Catch more of them!
Gotta catch 'em all!
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Catch more of them!
I'm sick of the widespread mentality that cheating is not only desirable but necessary, and that if done for the purpose of "getting ahead", it's alright. I sure wouldn't want a doctor or a lawyer who cheated their way through. I want one who took every test honestly and demonstrated they actually learned the material.
Exams don't work. Never did actually. At least they don't test for anything really usable except the ability to memorize textbooks, and the ability to utilize this under 'planned stress' on the specific day of the exam, maybe combined with luck as to which questions are on the test. If you happen to have a bad day, or get severely nervous waiting for the exam, you test a lot worse than your real level of expertise.
Remember, the real world does not in any way resemble the exam situation. In the real world, p
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A car accident is, well, an accident. And if you do something seriously stupid, such as drive drunk and cause a wreck, it most certainly can have lifelong consequences.
Cheating or lying, conversely, is a very deliberate act. It takes conscious effort to make up a cheat sheet or come up with a lie. Now, I'm not talking about telling your wife "No, honey, you look great" in terms of what I mean by "lying". I am talking about fucking up and then covering up.
I could see giving someone a "second chance" if the m
but when they reuse last years test and call it ch (Score:2)
but when they reuse last years test and call it cheating to use the old one as a study guide.
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Come now, even serious criminals are given the chance to rehabilitate. Exams tend to take place when people are young and foolish. People change. Not always, but often enough that you can't hold youthful indiscretions against them permanently.
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As a college mathematics instructor, I would never consider giving any test question that did not have an unambiguously correct answer
Well that's easy enough and perfectly reasonable for a maths exam. For a arts exam on the other hand, if you did that, it'd be a serious case of dumbing down. In the UK, for an exam which is part of an official qualification, marking by someone who does not know the examinee is the norm.
Scare tactics (Score:2)
After all, some other ways [slashdot.org] work too.
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He only did that because he didn't have a way of proving absolutely that any particular individual cheated. If there's a foolproof way of catching a cheater, such as being seen in the act by an invigilator, then that's unquestionably a good thing.
Government Workers? (Score:3)
If it were, I'd say: make them take a polygraph, a urine test, and walk through a backscatter machine before entering the test room.
I know those are either nearly useless (backscatter and polygraph) and of questionable value to society (urine test), but government and corporations make us take them... let them do it too.
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Far simpler, pass a law stating that if any employee of any organization has to do those things all the execs must too. Written in such a way that if a postal employee has to piss in a cup so does the President. This sort of crap would disappear overnight.
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I said "If someone is under the influence of drugs or alcohol, who is likely to do the most damage to the company and its employees? Obviously the managers. Therefore, I'll pee in a cup and show you the results, if you will show me the results of YOURS."
I only did that to somebody I had learned I really didn't want to work for anyway. But I have told others that I simply won't take the test, period.
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You realize they could hide the items in something that confuses the machines or just do what prisoners do.
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No, I question their usefulness. They have shown to be nearly useless, for example, at detecting certain kinds and configurations of explosives. I believe they would probably be equally useless at detecting, say, cheat notes under your shirt.
And let's not forget the health questions that are raised by the ionizing radiation. Even the radiation that bounces off excites m
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Kids have it too easy... (Score:2)
Disrespectful punks, get off my lawn!
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And why allow phones in the first place?
While that is an admirable aspiration I think that cell phones / smart phones have reached the point that disallowing them is no longer practical.
My sister is a high school math teacher and she says that in her school students are not allowed to use a phone during class but she still confiscates at least one per week. Normally the kids are not cheating but just texting friends. Actually the second most common is taking pictures of the exam paper! In any case the teachers only recourse is to confiscate
Test with no collaboration and no open book / gool (Score:3)
Test with no collaboration and no open book / Google are not the real world and just lead to people who can pass the test but have no idea on how to do the work.
The tests need be better less about memory and more hands on. Also how many people have jobs when having a book, reference guide, google, a manual, and more is banned and having others working / help with you is a no no?
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I used to think as you do, and I've come to realize that while it's very true for some things, it's exactly wrong for many.
Test with no collaboration and no open book / Google are not the real world and just lead to people who can pass the test but have no idea on how to do the work.
Well, to start with, if you only know how to solve the problem with Google, do you really know how to solve the problem? Anyone can Google for the answer. What you need to do is solve the problem yourself. Yes, it's boring, it's something everyone else has already solved, and you probably solved at least once on the homework. But if you can solve this problem, you've demonstrated that i
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Google: define: string quartet [google.co.uk]. What's wrong here?
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The reason being that in the real world, chemists look things up constantly, nobody is expected to know everything, and with a field of any complexity they won't know everything.
LOL (Score:3, Funny)
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brb, going to text my friends during their finals
You mean your former friends?
our parents failed so miserably that (Score:2)
Our parents failed so miserably that the only way to catch cheaters is with technology. Cause it's too hard to raise them to be upstanding adults.
I bet you they'd blame someone else if we pointed out the kids weren't raised well. (And then fuss about how today's youth won't accept responsibility, while expressing confusion over who they learned that from!)
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The better you can catch cheaters, the better those who are upstanding adults will do. An honor system with no verification at all merely rewards the dishonorable.
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It's a lot harder to fool that sort of comprehensive assessment than a written exam covering most of the class' grade.
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Nonsense. Honesty in any generation is adorable in OTHER people, but doesn't confer a competitive advantage.
Our elite masters are rich and corrupt, our leaders are SELECTED for dishonesty because they must pander to a large spectrum of often-conflicting voter desires in order to be elected, and our co-workers are often corrupt ass-kissers who knob their way up the chain.
It's logical to avoid getting caught by being reasonably honest, that is all.
Faraday cage (Score:2)
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run an unshielded ground wire down the length of every stud and every sheet will be contacting ground. Cheap and simple.
Cost? (Score:2)
How many times a year are exams held? I count less than twenty, and probably more like ten, for a given course -- and they do try to pack the exams relatively close together.
Should the exam rooms sit idle the rest of the time? I generally see lecture halls being co-opted as exam rooms, but they're useful as lecture halls the rest of the time.
Or are you saying we should cage everything that might ever be used for an exam, so students can't use laptops or cell phones during class? Do not want.
If you can come
No different than IT Certification Exams (Score:2)
My wife writes certification exams for a large IT company. It's not enough that her company has to create 6-7 versions of their exam and pull 100 questions out of a pool of a 1000. In older versions you could go back and check/review/revise an answer before you hit the big "Submit for Grading" button. Now the exam constantly grades you and when it determines that either you cannot pass or you cannot fail, the test is automatically ended and you score is provided. Thereby making it harder for someone to
if they are paying people to memorize the test the (Score:2)
if they are paying people to memorize the test then that shows that the test is to much based on memorizing stuff and will be better off being made so its more hands on.
Government workers? (Score:2)
I presume, since cheating on the exam shows a disregard for rules and a willingness to lie to gain advantage over others, they will now be fast-tracked onto the management course?
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I imagine the gov is more interested in easily catching cheaters, not preventing them.
And it probably likes the idea of catching innocent people who just appear to be cheating by circumstantial evidence.
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wonder what would happen if i placed a burner phone under the seat of someone i hate and set a web service to send me daily text messages at specific times.
I can get stock quotes at just the right times if I want.
The more monitored we become the easier it is to let the law screw with people you dont like or need out of the way.
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I would imagine that simply having a cell phone signal near you would not be enough to qualify you as a cheater. More likely, they used the presence of the cell phone signal to investigate further for other signs of cheating.
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No, it wouldn't. At most, it means there were cell phone signals in proximity. Could be as simple as someone with a smartphone they forgot to turn off, which checked for email (or was pushed email) during the exam. They were supposed to be off, but simply being on doesn't rise to the level of "cheating," which is a pretty strong accusation.
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And, when drunk driving laws were first introduced, simply having a BAC above a certain number was not enough to guarantee a DUI conviction- they had to actually prove you were impaired.
But then MADD pushed to make it a 'per se' law- meaning just having a Blood Alcohol Content above a certain number was enough to make you guilty. Doesn't matter if you are a hardcore drinker and .090 barely makes you buzzed- you're illegal. Meanwhile, that 110-pound girl over there who's never drank before and is obviously c
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Your post is a troll. People get testing all the time after being pulled over for completely unrelated incidents. And that's completely ignoring road blocks specifically set up to look for people who have been drinking.
The simple fact is, MAD is an organization who actively seeks to justify their own existence. They see their primary goal as to punish anyone who drinks. They are now pushing to create a new category for drink, who would also be punishable by law, for what would equate to having one drink.
MAD
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"..which checked for email (or was pushed email) during the exam. .."
Mmm, getting pushed an email with the answers to the questions is what one would expect from a cheater, no?
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Additionally, forgetting to switch a device off during exams could be considered as 'making available' a cheating possibility and should be punished to the greatest extent.
Re:Expensive cheats (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Taiwan, and at any exam that I have ever attended there is one simple rule. If your cellphone even as much as vibrates while you are taking a test you are disqualified at that moment. We are told this beforehand and are recommended to turn off our cellphones.
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This is common practice also in Italy. Police is usually monitoring RF channels even during driving license written tests.
However it's still beyond me why someone should try to cheat in such a test: you're likely to spend more time/money cheating than studying. Maybe it's just because someone believes having been able to cheat makes you cool...
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This was a test for an exam for a job, not a school exam. Why would you hate someone you just met enough to sabotage their exam?
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Wow, those R&S analyzers are some serious tools! I was just looking at frequency analyzers over at DealExtreme, where they have a dirt-cheap handheld model that sniffs out cellular frequencies for $60. Or they could have hung a cell jammer in the room for about a hundred. Or if they really thought they had to have the fancy gear, they probably could have hired in a contractor who would have sniffed around for maybe $300 per hour, and known what he was doing.
Was it was really worth the $40,000 they probably spent on them?
Oh, that's right. It's a government organization. Spending money is in their job description.
You were doing fine right up until you pulled that number out of your ass and segued into an anti-government rant. TFA doesn't say it cost 40k to do this.
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The FSH4 specified on TFA is not cheap. Add custom programming and you're probably well over $40,000 for three of them even without typical government contract bloat.
http://www.google.com/search?q=FSH4&tbs=shop:1,p_ord:pd [google.com]
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Yeah they aren't cheap, the low end of the prices listed on that google search seem to tally with what the base price would have been (I had to work the education discount backwards to figure out the base price) for ordering direct from R&S (we bought a FSH8 recently at uni).
No idea if the police would have got a discount , what the custom setup actually consisted of (it may well have just been setting up the right frequency ranges) or whether they bought any extra options (extra options can seriously a
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They could have just borrowed it from another governmental organization...
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You were doing fine right up until you pulled that number out of your ass and segued into an anti-government rant. TFA doesn't say it cost 40k to do this.
TFA didn't have to quote a price. My estimate was based on publicly available information from the marketplace, and was certainly not "pulled out of my ass." My methods are very repeatable, and I suggest you replicate them yourself. I googled for "FSH4", then clicked "Shopping", then sorted by "price: high to low", figuring these units would float to the top of anything else numbered "FSH4", and they certainly did. New unit prices on the set of results ranged from $17,882.25 to $9,220.00, with a median
Re:Expensive cheats (Score:4, Insightful)
Cell Jammers are normally illegal.
A far better idea is to make a test center room that is a faraday cage. Now you are blocking everything, not just cell phones.
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Cell Jammers are normally illegal.
A far better idea is to make a test center room that is a faraday cage. Now you are blocking everything, not just cell phones.
Everything outside of the room - it wouldn't stop (or detect, as in this case) cheating between examinees.
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Excuse me, but how do you reach a cell phone tower to share data from inside a Faraday cage?
Built-in walkie talkie systems might be able to connect, but most such in modern cell phones are simply free use of the local cell system for other subscribers. They still require the cell towers.
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I was thinking something a lot easier, and more convenient for a bunch of examinees - like the peer-to-peer Wi-Fi or Bluetooth on their phones.
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Kind of impractical. I have a brother in law who has a faraday cage at Intel and its quite large, but most testing centers I've been into (even smallish ones) are bigger and even then - this faraday cage was quite expensive.
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Wow, those R&S analyzers are some serious tools! I was just looking at frequency analyzers over at DealExtreme, where they have a dirt-cheap handheld model that sniffs out cellular frequencies for $60. Or they could have hung a cell jammer in the room for about a hundred. Or if they really thought they had to have the fancy gear, they probably could have hired in a contractor who would have sniffed around for maybe $300 per hour, and known what he was doing.
Was it was really worth the $40,000 they probably spent on them?
Oh, that's right. It's a government organization. Spending money is in their job description.
What's worse is this... I've never cheated on an exam, but if it were me in class, I guess I'd be suspected of being guilty of such. Something to do with owning a smartphone that's always sending and receiving data (besides the normal stuff, it checks my servers to make sure they are online and running every 3 minutes, and does a variety of similar things).
I guess in reality, they only proved that people didnt turn off their cell phones. As circumstantial evidence, assuming that rule was clearly dissemina
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At our exams, it was always clearly explained in the handbook, in the starting announcements, and on the cover page of the top sheet on each desk's papers that phones and electronic devices are to be on the desk, screen up, and turned off; and that if you're found to be violating that rule it will be considered as evidence of 'possible cheating, or attempting to do so'.
It'd be difficult to misinterpret that.
Do any relevant institutions /not/ have similar rules and procedures?
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Do any relevant institutions /not/ have similar rules and procedures?
Dunno, we were still using stone tablets when I went to college.
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Obviously you're not required to - you also have the option of leaving it in your bag, locker, or home.
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You'd be better off having something else monitor the servers and push an alert to you on a status change...
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No it was not because the proof from them is still inconclusive as they do not decrypt the network traffic. All that is clear is that the 3 people in question have used cell phones. This breaks the exam rules, but it is not conclusive if that was to cheat or simply a case of acute jobsian fondleslab addiction.
If you want to detect if people are cheating the best approach are kits which femtocell manufacturers sell on the side to security agencies worldwide. These pretend to be the cellular network and allow
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He's not a troll. The submitters and the test givers were had by R&S's marketing department.
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I imagine they're more interested in catching the cheats, rather than preventing cheating.
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A lot of those devices are out of support in 5 years, and govt labs usually replace them at that time.
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Spectrum analyzers don't decrypt the signal, they only check for its presence.
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They weren't monitoring their conversations/texts.
The weren't listening in.
A spectrum analyzer as the article mentions simply says there is a cell phone signal emanating from a location.
They don't even have to be in a call at the time. All they would need is to have a powered on cell phone on their person.
Since (presumably) cell phones are forbidden in the test room, you simply walk in, use your detector to locate and walk over to the cell phone holder and demand it.
TFA says:
The devices checked for signals from pagers or mobile phones near the test site.
Those sitting for the exam are supposed to shut off their mobile phones to stop test answers from reaching them via calls, text messages or vibrations.
There was no search. There was
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Why would you need one? You could simple add something like this on the form you sign to take part of an exame. You hereby abide by this contract to not use any form of outside or electronic help during the course of this exam. And also to not use any type of communication device, included but not limited to cellphones. You also accept that during the exam, on the vicinity of the exam room, a device will be installed to monitor inbound and outbound communication, to scan for possible attempts to have extern
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Not if the person thinks to turn their cell phone off.
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Plenty of people are able to text without needing to look at the screen. And long hair can easily cover an earpiece.