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Students at Maryland use new technology to cheat on exams.
By CHRIS MULDROW COUNT ON THE fine minds of our nation's college stu- dents to examine new technologies, assess their capabilities and find new, innovative uses for them. Take the group of students at the University of Maryland, for instance, who devised an interesting new use for mobile phones. They used them to cheat on exams. The students apparently had mobile phones with Internet access, which is becoming increasingly common on even the basic levels of phones on the market. One of the services available on these Web-enabled phones is instant messaging, where a phone user can type a message on the phone's keypad and send it to another phone user. The students were taking advantage of a rather weird thing the professors were doing. The professors would post answer keys online as soon as the tests started so students could finish their tests and immediately check online and see if they had missed some answers. But the students instead enlisted a helper to take a look at the answers and feed them via instant messaging to students still taking the test. The plot was foiled when university officials posted fake answer keys in an attempt to "sting" the cheaters. Six students admitted cheating and six more were implicated in the scheme. The crazy thing about this was that the university believes the majority of the cheaters came up with the idea independently. In other words, this wasn't a cheating "ring," it was a bunch of students who saw the test keys on their own and said, "Hey, that extra charge for Web access on my phone is finally going to pay off." I think some students are wired to hunt down innovative ways to cheat on exams. I remember a classmate several years ago who discovered that his rather advanced scientific calculator could store text as well as numbers. He proceeded to write down a bunch of information for his exams and brought the calculator along to several classes. He'd pull that thing out and start tapping away, and it looked like he was just absentmindedly working out some figures. But he was really pulling up his storehouse of exam answers. Have you seen the fancy Web-enabled watches Bill Gates was showing off a few weeks ago? At first, I thought it was just a geeky toy, but now I can't shake images of 12 students peeking at their watches and furiously scratching down answers in the exam booklets. I wonder if schools are going to have to start stripping students of any electronic gadgets before they take tests. Or worse, maybe they'll have to build some rooms that are shielded from outside electronic signals to prevent cheating signals from coming through the walls. Of course, I guess students could always revert to the old standard: a full set of answers, scrawled on the white soles of a battered pair of Converse All-Stars. CHRIS MULDROW is editor of fredericksburg.com.
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