US schools banning iPods, DAPs to curb digital cheating
By Darren Murph 
posted April 28th 2007 7:31PM
posted April 28th 2007 7:31PM
Slowly but surely, phenomenons such as texting and digital cheating are being both accepted and rejected (respectively) in high schools across the US. Apparently, school boards are just now figuring out what an iPod is truly capable of, as the gigabytes of space can hold an awful lot more cheat sheets than a mere TI-83 can (fess up old schoolers, we all did it). While cellphone bans have typically been in effect for some time now, it appears that the secret of using display-touting DAPs and PMPs to cheat is coming out, but why in the world has it taken this long? Besides that, we find it a bit curious that teachers weren't already frustrated with being tuned into with just one ear, as it seems that music players in general would cause quite the distraction in your average high school learning session. Still, it won't be long before diminutive Bluetooth earphones become all the rage, and once more institutions of learning will be futilely fighting the same battle all over again.
So I don't understand why schools don't have general policies to not allow these things in class at all (leave them in the locker!). If someone were listening to a walkman or something to that effect when I was in school, it would be confiscated... these days, teachers get threatened or beat up if someone takes their iPod. That's bullshit.
Well, think of it this way:
You're in an art class, say...working with plaster. And to get into your groove you need that one song to really get the juices flowing.
The real trouble is that people need to cheat, not that they can.
akintz, I don't know about that idea- allowing teachers to confiscate things from kids.
I lived in a supposedly strong school district, wasn't a bad kid by any means, got 99.9 percentile on SATs and so on but I still despised most of my high school teachers.
A lot of high school teachers are simply not qualified to make important decisions and shouldn't be given too much power than they already have.
Should students be forced to give up their music altogether just because a few bad apples (who are probably going to be flipping burgers in a few years) want to listen to music DURING class?
And should students be forced to risk having their DAPs stolen by leaving it in their lockers? Let's not forget school lockers are not a haven from stealing.
For the good high school teachers in the crowd who are going to respond vehemently, please don't bother.
Yes, I realize that there are good ones but I'm sure they're in the minority.
Stupid thing is that for all the time spent learning how to set up the iPod to cheat could've just been spent studying and learning. And for teachers (I myself am one) - why not just figure out what captivates the student so much about learning how to use the iPod to cheat and translate that into learning?
Mat, it takes about 30 seconds to put a .txt file onto your iPod and is not hard to figure out how to do. It takes me much less time to put the answer sheet into a .txt and onto an iPod than to study something. I take it you dont have one...
The cheating part is simple, and it takes almost no time at all. Just type up a .txt and transfer it to your iPod. It's actually the not having to study part that gets us interested.
Oh, and it's way easier to cheat with your TI-83 than it is with your iPod, because if you're using your calculator during a chemistry exam, it's no big deal. If you pull your iPod out, it becomes a bit obvious what your motives are.
If the kids are cheating, that means that the teacher isn't doing his/her job. You don't learn a lot in a difficult class, you learn a lot in a good class.
Let the kids have iPods, fire the shitty teachers.
So cheating kids = bad teacher?
WTF? That's a terrible generalization. It apparently has nothing to do with lazy kids who don't want to take the time to learn? Or want to take the easy way out? Or just aren't incredibly honest people? I could go on...
No, it's the teachers? Ha... right.
I think your Zune would be just as safe if you left it on your desk with a sign that said "take me".
As a high schol student myself I can say that this will do nothing to stop cheating. Personally I find that actually studying for a test is the best way to pass it but several of my peers have devised extremely clandestine methods of smuggling answers into a test. Besides, iPods have been banned at my school for the past four years
If the kids are cheating, that means that the teacher isn't doing his/her job.
---
Shit for brains, that's not the teacher's job. The teacher is there to help you learn, not to do all the work for you.
Some classes where book-type learning isn't as major and you're working on your own for the most part would seem OK for some sort of media player. But then if you end up allowing it for one class... blah blah blah. That's kind of how I see it.
OH SHITT!!!!! THEY KNOW???!
In my Economics class, a student asked the prof if we could use our cell phone's calculator (for those who didn't bring a seperate calculator) during our midterm. Our prof then said, "Yeah, sure, I don't think you guys would store any information on your phones".
...I then used my BlackBerry and looked up definitions on Wikipedia...hehe.
Old-schoolers? I still cheat with my TI-83.
Hell yeah, I do it in physics all the time!
Why memorize those formulas, right?
Here In India.. Te Schools Are Gadget Les.. No Mobile, Cameras, Mp3 Players,, Nutin..
On behalf of Indians everywhere, I'd like to apologize for "r4ghav's" method of presentation of his comment. No, we don't all type like that, and most of us do have a pretty decent grasp of the english language.
Anyway, coming on topic, r4ghav is right - in India, kids aren't allowed any electronics in class, be it iPods or cellphones or anything of the like. While we have no problems of digital cheating here as a consequence, kids are smart enough to devise other ways to circumvent authority and get the job done.
Sigh... Maybe if we strip-searched the kids, put blinds on their eyes like we do on horses (I forgot the name of those things...) and made them sit 10 feet from each other?
Isn't that your typical "State Board Exam" setting anyway?! :P
Don't forget the fingerprinting when entering the room. Hahahaha, they still do it on the MCAT exam.
I think they are called blinders.
My School seems to have found a pretty simple way to deal with it... We are only allowed Cell Phones in class, and they have to be shut off, not even on vibrate. If someone is caught with an mp3 player in class it's taken away until the end of the school week, and Cell Phones are taken until the end of the day.
I don't think the solution is to ban them all together, it'll just cause more problems. The main problem we've had isn't them being on in classes, it's that they're being stolen. In my science class alone we've had 6 iPods stolen, 1 of them being the teacher's. I just keep my Zune in my locker/at home.
Only in a second rate education system would you find this problem occurring. Back in my day we weren't allowed to have 'Walkmans' at school. So when iPods came about, they were of course banned by the general policy already in place.
To curb cheating during exams or tests you were only permitted 'Pens, Pencils, eraser, ruler, etc' (the basic necessities to complete the task). If a calculator was required, it had to be handed in to an examiner where they reset the memory (worth noting that calculators capable of InfraRed / Bluetooth were not allowed).
Then again, that's just Australia. US' take on copyright laws is piss weak with their fair-use clause, as is the education system. :-)
Ahh.. I remember my TI-83+... I didn't think to cheat with it at the time, but I did discover QuadFrm from a friend who had a Serial cable. Made quadratic equations a cake walk. I also got Super Mario Bros (and the editor, along with some neat levels my friend made) and Lotus Challenge on it.
Good times pretending to learn in Gr. 12 math.
The TI-83 was great... I used to set up whole math programs for each test on those for my friends with individual passwords and all. I guess I didn't consider it cheating since I wrote the programs and had to know how the formulas worked to get the correct answers.
The high school banned cell phones, iPods, and CD players on their distraction abilities when I was a sophmore 3 years ago.
Did anybodys school allow CD players or cell phones during class?
Ironically, my high school just "un-banned" all portable audio devices, from iPods to CD players. They're now allowed before school, after school, and during all unscheduled periods, including lunches and passing periods. Before, these things weren't allowed at all- not even after school.
I don't understand how an iPod could possibly be used to cheat during a test, though. Unless some schools actually let their students listen to their iPods during tests? How ridiculous. If it's just the fact that they're worried about kids reading/listening to SparkNotes between classes, well, that's not any different than reading printed SparkNotes between classes. Maybe they should ban paper, too?
I don't even know why high school teachers allow the use of graphing calculators.
These new ones like 89 titanium and so on, can calculate limits, perform chain rule with matrix multiplication, take partial derivatives, give you Taylor's expansions, etc.
So what are the kids learning if they can do all that using just the calculator?
And if it is allowed, then obviously it would be incredibly foolish for anyone to not make use of them.
I'm also appalled by all these "I cheat too" confessions.
Certainly one can get through high school with I imagine, a very good GPA by cheating.
But there comes a point where that doesn't work anymore.
For example, I just got done grading a bunch of exams this morning for a upper division college science class (I won't specify which) and the average must have been in the 40-50% range.
It's all too amusing because I know most of those 40 to 50% range are likely self-professed pre-health professionals and of course, their dreams will get crushed by this class, among others.
Well, I guess it would've been nice for them to learn how to study earlier in their lives, like in high school, huh? Or not cheat their way out of AP exams.
im in highschool and believe in studying but its not very hard to cheat. using an ipod to seems really dumb, ipods should be banned in class but not in study hall
I'm a ch.ch.ch.cheater!
I used the the TI-83+ to cheat in my algebra class back in middle school.
I used the TI-89 titanium to cheat my way through calculus in high school.
I used my iPod in high school to read cliff notes, and continue to use it today in college. :0
I agree that there should be stricter policies regarding the usage of electronic devices uring tests. I used my Pocket PC running a TI-83 emulation in college statistics, trig and calc, and it would have been so easy to just load up the entire texts so I could pull up anything I might have needed - all those other suckers wasted their money on iPods and still had to buy the calculators...
Someone at my high school put all of Shakespeare's Macbeth on his iPod and used that during an in-class writing assignment in English. Though I imagine it have taken a long time to scroll through that thing to find what he wanted.
The problem is that if you reset the mem-bank for calcs
1. it eats up way to much time
2. you will lose alot of the programs that you need for other classes
in my school they allow laptops on your desk.
K.... Stop for a sec.... please think.....
Do the kinds of tasks we are asking students to do on a test lend themselves to be easily "cheatable"? If the assessment is asking a student to do little more than recall information, then an iPod could easily be used to store and recover that information... a "cheatable moment".
What if we were using assessments that asked students to access and use information to create a new idea, or solve a problem in an innovative way that demonstrates that they can THINK!?
We are going to continue to run into this wall as long as we have 2.0 students attending 1.0 schools.
Whatever, my university has general rules against electronic and communication devices while writing exams. Obviously high schools should too.
The great thing about university is that it's the real world where you are responsible for your actions, and punishment can vary from retaking the exam, to financial penalties to being booted out entirely.
For people saying "calculators make people not need to have to learn anything in the first place", don't forget calculators have a big role in the real world. FFS, you're on Engadget, and therefore should know a thing or two about the role of technology. At uni (doing an IT degree) I have a unit on statistics and even if we have all sorts of software, people still fail because they have no idea how to interpret the results.
But using your calculator or other device to store notes is plain cheating. And there is no need to have music with you everywhere. Some of today's teenagers might regret having headphones in their ears all day in 50 years time.
They should bump em out. They should have to write on the palm of their hand like we had to write on the palms of our hand.. Kids these days...
http://www.burnedbytheman.com
how about bluetooth headset? hehe
As an English teacher in a tech school, I can say that mp3 players are a boon. The school bans them, but I let the kids use them while they read.
1) It gives me something to take away if they misbehave. The kids in my classes don't care if they get detention, they don't care about in school suspension and they don't care if they pass my classes. They care about their mp3s and cell phones.
2) If they didn't have them, they wouldn't read. They'd talk to other students and nobody would do any work.
3) They're no more effective a cheating tool than a piece of paper. A good test makes cheat sheets ineffective and useless. A good test requires answers that require thought.
Of course, a cheat sheet would be perfect for bushes no child left behind tests. Those require no real thought, just memorization.
Just ban all music devices, the kiddies can survive 6 1/2 hours without music. Get them to actually talk to each other without becoming quiet emo kids.
The real cheater use the TI89 titanium and txtrider....
I'm not sure how true this is. I'm a sophomore in high school and stuff like iPods, and cell phones aren't allowed to be seen during school. In one of my classes in order to get your test you have to give your teacher your cell phone in exchange. In my math class we aren't allowed to use graphing calculators on tests, we can only use scientific or four function. When you think about it, cheating with an iPod, cell phone or graphing calculator is ridiculously obvious to the teacher. If you really want to cheat the old fashioned way of writing notes on your hand or a note card in your pocket is a lot easier.
"The problem is that if you reset the mem-bank for calcs
1. it eats up way to much time
2. you will lose alot of the programs that you need for other classes"
You can archive the data on a TI-83 (and up) by, go to view all files in the memory: "2ND" -> "+"[MEM] -> "2"[Mem Mgmt/Del...]
select the desired file and pressing the "ENTER" key, this then puts a star next to it. Then the standard reset technique:
"2ND" -> "+"[MEM] -> "7"[RESET] -> "1"[All RAM] -> "2"[Reset]
which teachers at my school use, does not effect the archived files. After this you must un-archive them before you can read those files, which can be done the same way they were archived.
Teachers can delete the files stored if they un-archive them and then delete them. Though if you're a teacher and are resetting a whole classworth of calcs then you might not take the time to check each calc for naugthy files. I used this method for a whole week in class and on the test to store formulas and program that would save me time computing said formulas step be step. I of course had to have a good understanding of the material to do this. It was cheating, but not b/c I didn't I was just lazy.
I hate all the book-learnin'