Disregarding how easy it would be to hide stuff in the system to the extent that school staff can't find it I find it hilarious how attractive complexity is.<p>It used to be pen and paper, maybe a slide rule. You couldn't cheat except by bringing in extra books or papers which were easy to detect.<p>Then they allowed electric scientific calculators which were checked prior exams. You could theoretically store some meaningful constants in their memory but it wouldn't have been very useful.<p>Then laptops... what a can of worms! Even making read-only terminals available for students during exams would open up loads of potential holes for cheating. But that's nothing in comparison to private laptops. Even private laptops booting the school's own USB images would be highly untrusted but letting students run their own software and hoping school staff to find any problems by inspecting them is, from the policy viewpoint, just going bananas.<p>In fact, if I were a non-hacker student I would oppose strongly to the whole idea because I could be certain that at least some of my peers would be using their laptops to hack themselves an advantage over me and most others.
Doesn't feel very realistic that average teachers can actually find hidden or encrypted files.<p>In Finland they use a custom live Linux image from a USB stick during the major exams: <a href="https://github.com/digabi/digabi-os" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/digabi/digabi-os</a> That is much harder to bypass. There's an old blog post (2013)
about its security: <a href="http://globatic.blogspot.dk/2013/08/evaluating-security-of-digabi-future.html" rel="nofollow">http://globatic.blogspot.dk/2013/08/evaluating-security-of-d...</a>
Here are the highlights from the article:<p>The Danish education minister (Merete Riisager) is proposing allowing schools to check their students' private computers, as well as their social media activity (and other internet activity), to avoid cheating occurring during tests/exams.<p>The ministry also clarifies that the schools should not be allow to force access to this information, but can demand access to a student's computer as a prerequisite for their access to the test/exam.<p>Should a student refuse, the school should be able to confiscate their equipment for up to 24 hours or completely expelling the student from the school. (Note: The article isn't clear whether this means from just the exam or indefinitely.)<p>It's important to note this is still a proposal. That is, it is in the <i>very</i> early stages of becoming bill or even law. Right now it is in the hearing process.
Hold your horses... Firstly, the minister tried to remove internet access from high school exams (good idea!), but parliament opposed this. Secondarily, the law is designed for cases where you know that someone cheated. A teacher might very well see someone exchange files on dropbox, but it is often impossible to prove. The law would allow the teacher to ask the student to show his/her "dropbox folder". The student can reject this, but naturally this will have consequences.
Some context: All danish high school students have their own laptop. Exams are supposed be a test of what the students have learned during the course (for the written exams this means during the last two or three years). To make exams reflect the normal work process of s student most exams are open book - books, notes, old exercises and papers are allowed.<p>Some exams are divided in two (English, math etc): one short part with nothing but paper and pencil and one longer part with everything allowed (except communication with others).<p>In recent years the publishing houses have gone digital in a big way. Some school no longer provide books for the student - the school buys subscriptions for online books. Until this year internet access during exams were forbidden (with the exception of access to dictionaries). This year a new law adjusted the rules. A wide coaliation of parties including the all three parties of the government decided that internet access should be allowed to.<p>This summer a few students were caught cheating. During the written exam they uploaded the paper/exercises to a firm that offered to write the paper for them - for a fee of course. As the rules are now only the student is breaking the law.<p>The minister felt a need to react and sent out a statement that internet access were to be banned. However she forgot to ask the coalition behind the high school reform. Even the two other parties in the government disagreed. In short: internet access will probably not be banned.<p>The latest idea from the minister is to allow high schools to search the computer of a student, if the school has a suspicion of cheating. (The irony is that the minister is from the most liberal party in danish politics).<p>Cheating is of course a serious matter, but the current proposal seems to be somewhat overreaching. It will hopefully not get the enough votes.<p>Question:
How would you prevent cheating in an exam where internet access is allowed?
This is a proposal that hopefully won't make it through. This is so over the line in terms of privacy.
I really hope that the rest of the politicians can understand how this is a major issue. No teacher or anyone else for that matter, should get access to students private files and social media accounts.
They would need something to scramble radio signals. Or the students could just use spy devices that are very small and can be hidden in clothes. In Sweden there's a test that you can take and if you nail it you can get into any school you want ...
I believe that this is great for children in order to become techies. At my high school, I learned a lot by having to configure a SSH server at port 80, in order to avoid port and site blocking. Luckily, they never blocked the link to putty.