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Smartwatches, pinhole cameras the latest armour of academic cheaters

[Professor Pakarat Jumpanoi shows a smartwatch used by students caught cheating in exams for admission to medical and dental faculties in Bangkok. PHOTO: Pakarat Jumpanoi/Rangsit University via AP]

Catching academic cheaters has always been a bit of an arms race with technological advances opening the door to exploitation. Back when typewriters were introduced, professors had to deal with not being able to identify students’ work by their handwriting.

Fast-forward a few decades and the deck is looking increasingly stacked in the students’ favour.

Earlier this month, a university in Bangkok cancelled some exams after discovering a high-tech scam in which students used eyeglasses with embedded cameras to photograph tests and relay the images to outside parties, who then looked up the answers and relayed the information back to the students via smartwatches.

The episode is reminiscent of a similar one at the University of Victoria in 2011, when two students used a pinhole camera to cheat on a medical college admissions test.

But while it might be easy to imagine groups of students running Ocean’s Eleven-type scams on clueless professors, the typical academic dishonesty at Canadian schools is much more traditional, says Bob Mann, manager of discipline and appeals at Dalhousie University.

“Sometimes there are cases where you go, ‘Oh, that’s a new one,’ but nothing as wild as the Google Glass thing,” he says.

“(But) there are certainly people who have tried to communicate with outside parties using cellphones.”

Of course, a huge part of academic dishonesty is more carelessness and laziness than any particular urge to game the system, suggests Mann.

“Students have an assignment and they go looking and they have lots of places online where they can look,” he says. “In some situations that information is presented a little bit too well packaged for students to resist.”

The increasing number of courses offered online or with remote exams also makes it tougher to ensure students are abiding the rules.

Mann gave the example of an online quiz that allowed students to see the correct answers after they submitted it. The students quickly figured out they could take the test and see the answers without submitting the quiz, and then take it again and get the right answers.

“This was discovered, the students penalized and the (quiz) publisher was notified of the issue and it was fixed,” he says.

He says the numbers of students caught cheating have been on the rise, but that may not be a sign of a growing problem, he says.

“The numbers gone up because we’ve gotten better at catching people.”

A survey conducted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2012 found 7,000 examples of cheating that led to disciplinary action, or a little over one per cent of the total student population. While the number may seem almost like a rounding error, any episode of cheating rankles school administrators, and any student elevated through deceit is displacing an honest one.

Julia Christensen Hughes, business and economics dean at the University of Guelph, says tools like plagiarism detection software Turnitin have pushed cheaters to find workarounds.

“As faculty bring on technology to help with detection, then other technology comes on that outsmarts that technology,” she says.

New software available for cheaters, for instance, changes just enough words and tenses in a plagiarized paper to get it past detection software.

And of course, there are the pocket cameras and watches and ear buds that are readily accessible to students, and hard to detect when they’re brought into an exam, she says.

Teddi Fishman, executive director of the International Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, says recent studies show that cheating has been relatively steady overall, but that certain types of cheating have increased, such as “contract” cheating.

“Where you actually have somebody else do your entire paper from a draft stage up to all of the revisions, those things are increasing in a very dramatic way,” she says.

She points to the success of anti-plagiarism software, such as Turnitin, with driving the market for “original” work.

“It used to be that cutting and pasting was a relatively safe way to cheat, and then we got better at detecting that, and then that became not so safe,” she says.

“You close one avenue and people find another one.”

In terms of prevention, schools tend to use a mix of the traditional and higher-tech. The tried and true invigilator walking the aisles during an exam is still a key deterrent. Cellphone signals can be blocked, though that’s not exactly common practice.

Mann says Dalhousie encourages faculty members to refresh exams and quizzes so the questions aren’t the same year to year. And students doing online courses often have their usage monitored, so the teacher can tell how much time is spent on each question.

And both Brock University and the University of Calgary have run programs where students are asked to put their valuables – particularly electronic valuables – in a transparent bag under their chairs for the duration of the exam.

But Fishman says perhaps the most effective way to limit academic dishonesty is a more low-tech approach.

“You try to impress upon students why it’s important that they actually choose to do their own work,” she says.

After all, the point of school is to prepare students for situations where academic constraints won’t be present.

“If they’ve internalized why it’s a good idea to do your own work, that’s going to be lot more successful than if we’ve put external constraints on them,” she says.

“One of the things about being in education is we’ve quickly realized that if it’s an arms race, we’re not usually going to win.”