* The ringleader placed his iPhone under his leg.
* He would lean back in his chair and hold the exam sheets up in the air. It looked a little unusual, but it (initially) seemed innocuous.
* What he was really doing was pointing the sheets downward toward the camera peeking out from under his leg.
* He was broadcasting the exam to God-knows-where.
* He and the other two students then received answers via tiny earpieces.
* In addition, the two other students would call me over to "ask clarification questions." In reality, they were trying to distract me while the ringleader broadcast the exam.
* I eventually realized they were cheating (after exam 1), but I couldn't figure out how, until another student (exam 2) approached me with a note that read, "The guy to my right has his phone under his leg. Every time you circle the room, he pushes it completely under his leg so you can't see it."
* At that point, however, each student was taking a slightly different exam (unbeknownst to them).
The ringleader emailed me at the end of the semester and said something to the effect of: "I know I don't deserve to pass, but if you fail me, I will have to stay an extra semester."
I ended up failing all three.
1. Cool! Tell me more! I love these puzzle/strategy games. Both how to cheat and not get caught and how to catch the cheaters.
2. Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?
For once, I would love for someone to step back and ask:
What the actual fuck is going on here?
Some people are apparently spending up to 11 years (on top of high school) trying to get a certificate, that would help them maintain certain socioeconomic status. Other people are actively preventing them in getting the certificate in other ways than the official ones.
This costs an incredible amount of money. The whole overhead is insane. Whole lot of people routinely spend several YEARS without actually receiving the certificate. College education is crippled, because it needs to prevent fraud first, teach people useful things second.
Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?
In my particular case, this was not an issue.
I don't want to go into detail, but the students were from a foreign country (this is part of why it was going to be a political nightmare for the Dean).
Two of the three could barely speak English (excepting the ringleader). I mention this ONLY because it was a big tipoff when reading their first exams: they all used idiomatic English phrases that were far beyond what they were capable of in casual conversation. They also used nearly identical phrasing when explaining their answers (another big tipoff).
If anything, I blame their university for admitting students who were incapable of succeeding without cheating. The whole escapade left me feeling dirty. The university admits foreign students (because enrollment/$$$). And they have to know many of the TOEFL scores are either unreliable or fraudulent.
This is not the sentiment I'm getting here. More like "wow, I hope I don't get a cheater for a doctor, and if they go into research they are likely to fake results in studies. This is a unfair to society, their future employers and subjects"
It's not about fairness in the socioeconomic ladder as much as the damage and cost incurred by having an incompetent fraud in a high-impact professional role.
While I agree with your sentiment, these people aren't aiming for "livable wage" but for (from their perspective) "the top".
Australia has a kind of free university for all. Australian citizens get an interest free loan of about $5k/year for tuition. You just pay it back by paying a little more tax on your income over $47k/year until it's gone. If you don't earn over $47k/year, you never pay it back, which is fine and expected. It's also easy to get welfare for housing and food as a student, so university is mostly "free". (For various values of free)
Even with all of that, plenty of people still cheat on university exams. I was shocked to learn about it, but there are always people who take that route.
Medicine is a large topic. It requires many years of memorization, experience, etc., and then it requires continuing education and constant practice. This makes the costs of medicine very high.
There is an opportunity for technology to help lower costs. The opportunity was identified decades ago, when the first work was done on expert systems for medicine.
The problem is that this means that if we succeed at applying technology to lowering the cost of medicine, it will look a lot like patients self-diagnosing. In rich countries we really don't like that. In poor countries self-diagnostics is common.
These people want to achieve status. Minimum income wouldn't help.
Until neoliberalism hit though. Then everything was about the market and the ideals of low pay gaps were budget cut into oblivion. Now there's huge inequality and students have to take out huge loans like in the US :(
Couple of points that I omitted.
First, I was teaching at a local community college. The students were from a nearby university. They were trying to avoid the equivalent classes at their own school and I assume they felt that I might be an "easy mark." I'm not sure what my options were with respect to reporting them to their own university.
Second, I was an adjunct at the community college. I informed the Dean of what was going on, but I got zero support. I could tell that the Dean felt that all I was doing was bringing him a problem that had the potential to mushroom into a political nightmare (no upside, only downside for him). The unspoken message that I got was, "Just deal with this on your own and don't turn it into a federal case." I don't know if the lack of support was due to me being an adjunct or whether it was due to "We need to keep our enrollment numbers up. Don't get a reputation for being a ball-buster."
I do think the bio-implanted device space is going to explode at some point. Here's where I see us headed:
* VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.
* Once very portable VR becomes a thing, augmented reality wearable glasses. As in real-time, amazing visuals that are seamlessly stitched into your reality, and so advantageous you won't want to live without them.
* Then bio-implanted augmented reality with wireless charging through the skin.
That's how I see the next 30 to 50 years unfolding in terms of devices. The first step is VR as the next big platform play. Incidentally I see three spaces there:
1. VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]
2. 360 film [Already here but cameras getting WAY better very fast]
3. Immersive vision-based augmented reality - visuals overlaid on regular vision. [Not quite here - but we do have PoC's and will be in the next couple years]
I just got a Quest 2, and totally agree. It's incredible for what it can do for the price. And that it's untethered. Anyone who's into tech or interested in the future of tech should get themselves a Quest 2. The immersion level of games like Superhot VR was totally mind-blowing to me.
I also think it's the future of home workouts. If Peloton's not working on a VR system then they'll be done in five years.
And yeah totally agree - I think one of the biggest changes here is the price. $300 is insane for what you're getting out of the box.
FWIW, I'm also wary of embracing full-time VR. I'd certainly like augmented reality, but immersive VR feels like too much yet.
I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub invests in VR in some way in the next 5-10 years.
PS explaining for a friend XD
But there are also other super exciting applications like dating e.g. a dating app facilitates the first date in VR and is able to provide safety controls making first-dates far more approachable and happen earlier on leading to more successful relationships.
You will not own the implants in your body.
They will be owned by a separate third party. You may still pay for them, and you may get some value out of the proposition, but they will not be under your control.
That's perhaps the most important aspect of our future.
[1]https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-10-05-biden-wore-wire-with-...
[2]https://twitter.com/3ree6ixty/status/1352444645125414913?ref...
2) Those allegations have surfaced around every debate since 2004 (or at least one debate every cycle)
3) Who cares if they were fed lines? Speechwriting isn't their job, nor is memorizing numbers.
The longest period we have seen a presidential candidate speak extemporaneously for is ~90 minutes (Biden town hall) which is an exceedingly rare occasion that came with pre-arranged questions and was mostly prepared talking points anyway.
One of the aims of a longform podcast would be to extend the interviewee out beyond their prepared talking points to see what happens.
We are asking for too much of our politicians, so they will find ways to cope out of necessity, by limiting the exposure. We all like to think that we'd do better, but after being shafted by twats who call themselves journalists a few times we'd all be doing the same.
It's ironic that to get more than this from politicians, it seems we need to be MORE forgiving of them. That is a hard pill to swallow, as a citizen.
That's not true. Only the last president outright refused to engage in unfriendly press. Obama may have called on Fox reporters less often and only got interviewed once or twice on the network, but he still engaged them.
Is it though?
Yes. The Quest 2 is incredible. No PC required, just a headset and 2 hand controllers. Games give you a completely immersed experience in a synthetic world where you can look around, explore, play, talk to other players in real time.
It is here and I would call it super fun, but not useful (maybe that's what you were questioning). I think it may be a fad like the Nintendo Wii, or it might hang around to varying degrees. Maybe I lack imagination but I don't see people wearing AR glasses in public or to work even if they do become ultra-compact and awesome.
Some people let their excitement lead them to believe "cool fun new thing" is somehow the magical future. I played Dactyl Nightmare (VR) back in the 1990's and have been waiting for awesome home-VR since then and quest is every bit of what I had imagined maybe it could be. But at the end of the day, rec-room paintball is just Dactly or Quake Arena. A 25yr old guy at work had to show me Mario Tennis on his Switch - it's just pong with special moves and fancy graphics. What's new is old, and I don't see any revolution with VR outside of niche applications like training and some visualization. Now get off my lawn while I go play some EchoVR.
I haven't tried the Quest 2 yet, so I don't know how good it is, but to me, it's not "completely immersed" until you can interface directly with my brain to feed it false visual, auditory, smell, touch, etc. signals, as well as interpret signals I make to move around, which causes me to interact with the virtual world instead of the real world.
Anything else to me just feels kinda clunky. Certainly the stuff available now is way better than stuff from 20, 10, or even 5 years ago, but it's a far cry from complete immersion.
But it's so much more immersive than what we had before that it's still really amazing. If you had skipped computers in the 80s and 90s because they were nowhere like perfect yet, you still works have missed out on an amazing time. The same is happening now.
Not to mention that a good 10% or more of people get violently motion sick from using VR.
Although now ubiquitous, excluding two cups and a string, phones have always been high tech, as opposed to low tech, like feigning a need to use the restroom to develop their cheating space, as obvious and overused as it is. I wonder who first pioneered the fake bathroom visit for cheating, as opposed to it being employed as an escape from the extreme pressures of the classroom, i.e. smoking.
I'm not making a judgement whether that's good or bad. I'm sure plenty will chime in with their opinion. I'm only bringing up the world of always on computing is probably coming and schools will need to find some other way to test students that don't require handicapping them by removing what they perceive as part of their brain.
Won't help much with recordings, of course, but that's more like a cheat sheet that's always on you; if you can succeed with it in a well-designed test environment, you can probably succeed with it in real life. At some point, if you're augmented, then memory is memory and there's no point in distinguishing between hardware and wetware.
Sure, the system overall isn't perfect, but detecting incompetence on the job (before being allowed to do any damage) is IMO the most likely scenario for cheating medical students who don't get caught at school.
Even if we consider other disciplines... say, civil engineering. You don't get your degree and then immediately get the job of Principal Engineer on a bridge-building project. You're supervised by engineers with more experience, and your work is checked and signed off on if it's correct. If your work consistently fails those checks, you'll get fired.
Implying that material they are testing is relevant in a practical setting ? I actually wonder if they ever do something like random tests for people that are 5+ years into their career - just unannounced testing to check retention and relevance.
If it's anything like CS I wouldn't be surprised if they would fail >90% people. People here complain about having to invert binary trees in an interview...
I shudder to think how many future doctors with a poor moral compass are getting through the system. Not only is their incompetence dangerous, their lack of ethics and craftiness could mean that they'll be harder to detect.
I think the manner is what makes this story interesting.
> could have major implications in the workforce
I don't think this is the case. Large bodies of people already operate as if they are completely amoral today (and realistically must be engaged with as if they are to get anywhere), so what major implications could a single actor with "lack of a moral compass" really have? That's completely ignoring the issue where I'm not sure what it is even supposed to be.
In fairness, this one person proved they can do implants :')
Dr Anand Rai, the whistleblower in the Vyapam scam [of 2008-2013], said: “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed. Such a technique was used by a Vyapam scam accused too to clear his medical exam eight years ago.”
This person was just one who got caught. The likelihood that they’re the first one to think or do this is very low.
There are probably more sophisticated ways of using tech to cheat and I would be very surprised if they haven’t been employed in high stakes exams like this before.