Comments on: Students assigned to cheat on exam use doctored Little Brother cover and many other clever methods

By: Robert McLaughlin

Robert McLaughlin — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 20:55:00 +0000

The 76 in the top row needs a 1 in between them. Wow, memorizing pi in high school finally paid off!

By: zikman

zikman — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 23:19:00 +0000

well it’s a good thing I already have the first 80 digits of pi memorized. twenty more would be trivial.

By: drabkikker

drabkikker — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:35:00 +0000

I think everybody saw it was extremely bad Esperanto.

By: Benjamin Stürmer

Benjamin Stürmer — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 07:08:00 +0000

Did anyone else notice that the student who made the Big Brother cover actually did memorize the first 18 digits of pi?

By: awjt

awjt — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 00:06:00 +0000

Exactly my thought, ACTUALLY cheat, and lie about your method of cheating!

By: DewiMorgan

DewiMorgan — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 22:55:00 +0000

The temptation to cheat this test would have been HUGE!

I mean, the temptation to break the *one rule* they gave for the class: don’t memorise it.

By: WhyBother

WhyBother — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 20:03:00 +0000

“Technically though, going to extreme ends to cheat defeats the purpose of cheating, often making it less work to play fair.”

Unless you’re really good at cheating. Just because the typical person would spend ten times as long duplicating your cheat as they would studying, it doesn’t mean that you put that much effort into it. You could just be better at cheating. Similarly, just because you put in ten times the effort at studying as a typical person doesn’t necessarily mean you will out-perform them. You could just be really terrible with the tested material.

Cheating isn’t just about dodging work; it’s about shifting work from something you’re bad at (physics, math, history, etc.) to something you’re good at (cheating). And honestly, it’s not that bad a strategy when you consider that the ability to cheat is a more general skill. It translates well to any test, regardless of subject. Further, if you take the time to cheat at every opportunity, even when you don’t really need to, you can improve your cheating abilities for when you really need them. Then it definitely shouldn’t take that much effort to set up a cheat in the future.

So long as you can avoid getting caught or being unprepared for a follow-up — a second test, a higher-level class, or a career that actually uses the subject — it makes a certain degree of sense. Alternatively, if you really want to make cheating unprofitable for everyone, have a test which is more closely linked to the material than it is to any previously test: assign a unique project to each person that actually requires them to use what they were supposed to learn.

By: Greg Gage

Greg Gage — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 19:00:00 +0000

This could have been a great paper. But where are the citations? Especially sweeping statements as the opening 2 sentences that set up their premise: “Adversaries cheat. We don’t.”. I am not sure if this is satire, or pseudo-science. I loved their talk though!

By: Nadreck

Nadreck — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:50:00 +0000

Well, it’s a beginner’s class and all that but the combination of being allowed to bring extraneous objects into the examination hall, something they never allowed in my day, and the availability, also unavailable until recently, of colour printers with any fonts you like in them, make this a rather trivial exercise. In my old Engineering school two of the students who were caught used handbuilt morse code radios in the shoe heels and carefully pre-planted rolls of toilet paper with answers printed on them. Presumably the people who weren’t caught did better than that but I wouldn’t know about such things.

By: Michael Curran

Michael Curran — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:48:00 +0000

Technically though, going to extreme ends to cheat defeats the purpose of cheating, often making it less work to play fair. In this case there was little or no risk of being caught, so complex solutions were counter productive.

By: gizmomathboy

gizmomathboy — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:42:00 +0000

They have an error in their pre-pub of the paper. Joseph Menn wrote Fatal System Error.

http://www.amazon.com/Fatal-System-Error-Bringing-Internet/dp/1586487485

By: lknope

lknope — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:41:00 +0000

Ironically, that sounds like a justification for cheating. Why waste your time and learn something new when it’s so easy to cheat on the test?

The point of the exercise was to learn to think like a cheater or to “think outside the box,” so the people who came up with the most innovative methods were getting the most from the exercise. Just because it’s possible to blatantly cheat on a test doesn’t mean that learning the test material is a waste of your time.

By: SamSam

SamSam — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:36:00 +0000

It’s the problem with embedding a joke on a slide and only getting to it after talking for three minutes. Most people will have already read it — but it would have been rude laugh while he was talking — and when he gets to it the impact is lost.

By: Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston

Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:36:00 +0000

“What’s the answer to number five, you ask me Professor? Well, I have a question for you on this fine Wednesday… How secure do you think the Happy Times Canary Song Day Care is? You know the one: where you left little Ashley at exactly 7:52 this morning. Aaaaaaah yes Professor, that IS the answer to number five. It is indeed.”

By: Zod

Zod — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:31:00 +0000

All’s fair in love and war…and it is guaranteed that our enemy will *NOT* fight us using our rules of fair-play!

By: awjt

awjt — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:29:00 +0000

The vid was awesome… the payoff of a VIP parking pass was motivation to cheat WELL. There were a few good ones, although no audio ones

By: alfanovember

alfanovember — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:28:00 +0000

THINKPAD REPRESENT!

By: Rachel

Rachel — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:09:00 +0000

I think he should have got more reaction to his esperanto line.

By: Michael Curran

Michael Curran — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:08:00 +0000

Meh, most just kept a cheat note, nothing impressive about that. Only a handful used innovative methods, which was clearly a waste of their time as even the most blatant cheaters went uncaught.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:57:00 +0000

I didn’t watch that video when I read first this article and that was the first thing that popped into my mind

By: Tom Holmes

Tom Holmes — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:53:00 +0000

He mentioned it at the beginning.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:51:00 +0000

Whoops, never mind then :{

By: Sagodjur

Sagodjur — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Watch the video. They mention Naruto.

By: Jason

Jason — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 17:33:00 +0000

This sounds kinda familiar. It feels like it was pulled from a episode of Naruto when a test was purposely made incredibly difficult so the majority of those taking the test were forced to cheat (using various ninja techniques) in order to pass it.

http://burninglizardstudios.blogspot.com/2010/06/manga-reviews-naruto-volume-5.html