Con artists caught tricking med-students into helping with high-tech entrance exam cheat

Two men in British Columbia are facing criminal charges for engaging in an elaborate high-tech ruse to cheat on the med-school entrance exam. According to investigators, the men told a group of med students that they were to be interviewed for jobs as MCAT (the standardized medical entrance exam) tutors, and showed them a series of grainy exam questions, asking them how they'd answer them. The questions were actually being relayed by a wireless pinhole camera from one of the con-artists, who was sitting the exam at the time.

The students grew suspicious, and when the "interviewer" left the room to relay their answers (using a mobile phone) to his confederate. They looked around the computer they were using and discovered that it had been used to research wireless pinhole cameras. They alerted campus security and began to feed bad answers to the questions they were receiving.

According to documents filed in provincial court in Richmond, B.C., Josiah Miguel Ruben and Houman Rezazadeh-Azar are each facing six charges including theft, unauthorized use of a computer, using a device to obtain unauthorized service and theft of data.

High-tech medical exam cheating alleged (via /.)

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blueelm

Hey, good thinking on the part of the med students once they caught on though.
seanboing

…and I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!
Anonymous

Bring back Oral Exams.

Difficult to cheat in them.
knoxblox

Good on the students for feeding the cheaters the wrong answers.

I think what dismays me more is my wonderment at whether cheaters, whether it be the construction and engineering trades, medicine, or law, think that they would actually be any more successful at their trade than before they took the exams.
On the other hand, do they have a simply blase attitude about putting the lives of others at risk through their own incompetency?
Anonymous

If you’re willing to splash out on buying the equipment needed for such a cheat, why not just *hire* a med-student to man the other end, textbooks in hand? It’s not like student labour is going to be back-breakingly expensive (loans to pay and all), and the plan already requires a confederate.
Thomas Harvey

Why? I can understand cheating to get through a final, but they just seem to be setting themselves up for a difficult couple of years in school. Even if it was a run through for getting others into med school, but again why bother you will just struggle.
karl_jones

Crowdsource my surgery. Think of the cost savings!
codesuidae

Next time they should spend some time pre-arranging a Mechanical Turk account with appropriately skilled workers and relatively high-paying HITs. Or, if they are serious, just hire a professional test-taker to advise on answers, they aren’t that hard to find. Just costs a little more.

Also, ditch the phone and use a custom radio with tactile feedback for the test taker. Maybe a stripped-down FRS band rig concealed in some heavy boots with a small vibrator motor, and possibly a small clothing-mounted LCD if text replies are required.

Honestly, these guys sound pretty amateur. Serious cheaters can do way better.

Naturally, detailed analysis of possible ways to cheat such tests is the first step in confounding people who would cheat. Obviously one of the biggest problems in schemes like these is the rather low cost of wireless communications devices. Difficult to address without rather invasive pat-downs though, and expensive to shield.
Sam125

The lengths people go through to cheat is really amusing. If they spent all of their energy studying instead of trying to devise ways to cheat they’d probably do better lol. Not to mention that they’d probably fail hardcore even if they were accepted into med school because of the cheating.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  If they spent all of their energy studying instead of trying to devise ways to cheat they’d probably do better
  
  Cheating, like stealing, is often about anger and revenge, not about needing or wanting whatever you take.
mccrum

Why does cheating seem like so much more work at times like this?

1 – Get crappy pinhole camera
2 – Get MCAT “tutors”
3 – Step out of tutoring process to send answers
4 – Colleague risks getting kicked from test for using cell phone
5 – Eventually fail out of med school or fail at profiting because insurance costs eat you alive for killing various patents
Anonymous

I say let them into an American med school anyway, where they’ll rack up a huge debt failing out of first year. Combine the travesty of financing an American medical education with this gentleman’s obvious propensity to fail and he just might learn himself a lesson.