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posted by janrinok on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-counter-for-low-tech dept.

Exams are stressful, so it's understandable that some people would want to circumvent the hard work of studying by instead cheating. For students taking the national university entrance exams in China, there's now one more little thing to worry about: drones, deployed to catch cheaters.

The drone is a hexarotor and, as reported by China's state-owned ECNS news service, it will scan for suspicious radio signals from exam-takers. While that won't stop any cheaters who use low-tech methods to get around difficult questions, it will detect any number of advanced methods that rely on the test-taker exchanging information with a second party outside the exam room. These methods include cameras hidden in glasses with transmitters hidden in water bottles, cell phones hooked up to flesh-colored wireless headphones, and pen cameras that film the exam-takers' test.

The anti-cheating drone hovers at 1600 feet above the ground, and can travel 3000 feet from where it's deployed. If it eavesdrops on a radio signal from one of these devices, the drone forwards the location to operators, who can see where that exam taker is on their mobile device. Cheaters who get caught can face legal penalties. ECNS states that the exam drone led to the arrest of 9 suspects in 2014.

http://www.popsci.com/anti-cheating-drone-will-watch-exam-takers-china

[Also Covered By]: Quartz, Daily Mail, Washington Post, and Wired UK.


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  • (Score: 2) by zugedneb on Sunday June 07 2015, @07:26PM

    by zugedneb (4556) on Sunday June 07 2015, @07:26PM (#193327)

    ...university is mostly just a very, hmm, tidy refugee camp.
    The students are there because they want a "better" life later, not knowledge.

    I mean, it should not matter if someone cheats or not, if they can hang on to the education and do well, they are in...
    If someone got in, and can't hang on, than maybe it should be investigated with possible legal "consequences".
    If there is not reason to "call the bluff" it is not a bluff...
    But for many programs it does not really matter who takes it, because they contain more "culture" than actual stuff that need a mental process. I am thinking of the soft sciences, and even medical studies.
    It is a chance to the better life that they guard vicously :D

    Really, there is just too much drama around "higher" aducation...

    --
    old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
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  • (Score: 2) by zugedneb on Sunday June 07 2015, @07:54PM

    by zugedneb (4556) on Sunday June 07 2015, @07:54PM (#193338)

    ...talked in a video about what made him want to become an EE.
    He told that even when he was a kid, he was fascinated by tech. He used to have small electronics kits, and catalogues and papers on the stuff.
    He had it as a hobby long before the university, and also mentioned that at the university, he cought on faster then the those who did not have it as hobby, to quote, "things just fell into place" for him.

    Allthought I did got admited to university based on my grades, I never had electronics as hobby as a kid, had no chance for it even. And that is exactly what made me a mediocre student. Stuff that should have fallen into place took weeks and months of digesting, and then even more work to master.
    But, in sweden, at that time, admission was very libaral. Everyone and their dog could get in to the engineering programs.

    The most interesting people who I talked to during my university times were like this dude. They knew electronics and programming. Some of them "failed" university, because they did not like all the math surrounding the topic, but i still respect and like them, even if know i know more about the "how" than them...

    Then, there were the top grade students. Except for a few who really deserved a phd position, they are mostly material for study in psychology... Why the choose and did what they did is a mistery.

    --
    old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by zugedneb on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:14PM

      by zugedneb (4556) on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:14PM (#193343)

      ...a couple of stories comes to mind, about how some "good technicians" failed uinversity education.
      - there were some who could take the "measurements and insturmentetion" courses, and understand the statistics involved in analysing the precision, they understood the properties of the components, and how they worked in a circuit. BUT for some magical reason, they did not have any success with the actual Statistics course.
      - there were those who had no problems with the complex numbers when used to calculate filter bandwidth and such, and had no problems understanding the actual filters, but had no success with the basic multivariable calculus. They hated it...
      - then there were those who had big trouble passing the electromagnetics fields course, at the time it was based on the book by Cheng. It was a mandatory part of the education, but honestly...

      Sometimes it felt like they were simply not interested enough, to take the time with the subjects, they found them tangential (i agree). They wanted the "real thing", when it did not come, they left...
      Some other truth is that the university failed to explain the why it thought what it though. The importance of some things in math i took in firs year did not become obvious until the third or fourth. Except for the fields theory, it was obvioulsy just calculus...

      --
      old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
      • (Score: 2) by zugedneb on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:31PM

        by zugedneb (4556) on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:31PM (#193354)

        To be absolutely honest with you, guys, I have failed too. I am actually, a dropout =)
        Apart form my lifestyle, and "attitude", there are some interesting reasons for my lack of success.

        As many of you know, the best of us can take the porblem into the head, and see it with the minds eye.
        Unfortunately, my head is very good with this. It becomes, like, a tune you cant get rid of :D
        I had to put down (low level) programming because if I went too deep into a problem, I kept thinking about it in my sleep.
        I could see the actual lines of code on the monitor in a "dream", and in a halfwake state tried to work with the trees and lists and all other structures. While asleep, i could detect that a line of thought have derailed, and when started to concentrate harder on the problem, I actually became awake...
        Eventually, sleep deprivation gets to you...

        --
        old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:15PM

          by kaszz (4211) on Sunday June 07 2015, @09:15PM (#193376) Journal

          This make consulting work or plain employee work quite interesting. How much time should one charge for? 168 hours per week? ;-)

        • (Score: 1) by anubi on Monday June 08 2015, @06:29AM

          by anubi (2828) on Monday June 08 2015, @06:29AM (#193538) Journal

          Interesting trio of posts, Zug.

          Kinda a confirmation of something I keep telling the kids... get into this STEM stuff only if their heart is in it. but if they are trying to get in it for prestige, boy has someone ever sold them the Brooklyn bridge.

          Damn near anything is better than having to comprehend technical manuals if one's heart isn't in it.

          --
          "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @06:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 08 2015, @06:12AM (#193534)

    But for many programs it does not really matter who takes it, because they contain more "culture" than actual stuff that need a mental process. I am thinking of the soft sciences, and even medical studies.

    Spoken like a true stereotypical arrogant narrow-minded engineer.