When I put up this post, highlighting a hilariously bad YouTube video on how to cheat on a test, one of the things I discovered was that there is actually an entire genre of “how to cheat” videos on YouTube. I didn’t realize I had tapped into such a resource, but I did. Since the earlier post got lots of comments, I thought I’d do another. This one is much cleverer and better-produced. Enjoy (I guess):
Like I said, a lot cleverer — and a lot harder to detect. The big hurdle here is that many classrooms don’t allow food or drink in the classroom, and even if they did, a prof could simply ban food and drink to circumvent this particular trick. But the problem there is that a student could perform this trick on anything with a label, and so if you ban pop bottles you might as well ban everything. Which some teachers and testing facilities do.
This trick also assumes that the person cheating has enough skill with Photoshop to create the fake label, and that’s a very big stretch. And if somebody is that smart then probably they don’t need to cheat in the first place.
The main problem with both this cheat and the one in the earlier post is that the cheaters are assuming something wrong about the basic nature of tests, at least at the college level. They are assuming that tests are about storage and recall of information. Maybe some (most?) tests in high school are like this. But at least in my classes, having a few bytes of information embedded into some kind of object using steganography just isn’t going to do you much good if you don’t know how to use the information to solve a problem. You might be able to smuggle in the limit definition of the derivative successfully into a calculus test, but if you can’t use the definition to calculate the derivative, that successful smuggling won’t have helped much. In that case, trying to look inconspicuous as you squint nearsightedly at your Coke bottle trying to read off the value of Planck’s constant is the least of your problems.
If these two videos are any indication of the state of the art in cheating on a test, the simplest way to foil attempts to cheat is simply to make tests less about storage and recall of information and more about problem solving and logical deduction. On final exams in my freshman courses, I allow students to make up their own notecard on the front and back of a 3×5 index card and bring it to the exam precisely because I do not want them to think that the exam is about storage and recall. “Legalizing” the cheat sheet has basically eliminated academic dishonesty from my final exams, and in fact students find that making up the card is an excellent way to review.
A far more dangerous form of cheating would be a system where a student taking a test communicates information about the test itself to another student, such as two students sharing solution techniques in real time to a problem on a test they are taking. There are ways to do this, but I haven’t seen a clever (or un-clever) video on YouTube yet about that.
Casting Out Nines 
“The simplest way to foil attempts to cheat is simply to make tests less about storage and recall of information and more about problem solving and logical deduction.”
Amen! Wish more teachers would get that.
I concur. Every test I gave last year (and 3 of 4 were 100% multiple choice) is so concept-based and requires so much critical thinking that I could have allowed full open-book open-note access during the test and it wouldn’t have mattered. In fact, it would have just slowed them down and lowered their grades.
Students have 24/7 access to viritually unlimited facts. It is not worth their time to teach them facts, but rather to teach them how to quickly assimilate new facts into a conceptual framework, and how to extrapolate from that set new potential facts and applications. Philosophically, I see this as my job as a professor.
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