Smart Watches Banned from Exam Rooms
Remember the good old days when cheating on your exams required ingenuity? Part of the challenge was not getting caught and expelled from school. Kids today have more technology at their fingertips but some schools have caught on and are way ahead of them.
Smart watches have been banned from Australia’s VCE exams to keep students from using them to cheat. A spokeswoman for the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority explained that students will not be allowed to wear their Apple Watches or other such devices into the exam room because they “have the capacity to store, receive and transmit information.”
Other Aussie citadels of learning like Monash University and La Trobe University have also banned the devices with more institutions considering doing the same. Students may bring in traditional timepieces but they must remain on top of their desks where the can be observed by exam monitors.
Not surprisingly, there is already a company working on a watch that allows students to ace their exams without all that pesky cramming. The “cheating watch” by 24Kupi allows a student to upload notes to be viewed during exams. The watch comes equipped with an emergency button to erase all data if an examiner becomes suspicious.
According to a 2014 research project from the University of Michigan, the schools will have to be on their toes to keep up with the high-tech ways students are developing to cheat using their mobile devices. The study concluded: “Although preventing cheating by banning such devices from testing environments may be somewhat effective, in the long run, threat models will need to be revised to take into account the rapidly increasing capabilities of wearable computing.”
Teachers and exam monitors are probably longing for the past when all they had to look for was students writing answers on their shirtsleeves or sneaking a peek at a neighbor’s answers.
