Medical student surgically implants Bluetooth into own ear to cheat in final

https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/india/mbbs-student-bluetooth-cheating-bhopal-b2021217.html

by softwarebeware • 4 years ago

609 464 4 years ago

independent.co.uk

changoplatanero• 4 years ago

i can't read the article cause it's paywalled. I wonder if he did the surgery himself or had an accomplice

gs17• 4 years ago

The article doesn't seem to say for sure, but it implies it was done by someone else.

FatalLogic• 4 years ago

If he implanted it himself, that would imply impressive surgical skills

edit: paywall bypass https://archive.ph/CCXpf

jotm4• 4 years ago

Does it? Seems like being able to cut and stitch yourself is the hardest part.

Funny story, I dealt with a pylonidal cyst on my tailbone by myself. I did not expect that much blood tbh (along with very stinky puss... sorry for the detail), but I managed to drain and clean it.

Apparently you need surgery for those... it really wasn't that hard, cutting in was the hardest part, but at that point the pain from it was worse.

Goz3rr• 4 years ago

There's an "I'll try later" button that removes the register/login prompt.

steanne• 4 years ago

After questioning by the college officials, one official reportedly said that he had a skin-coloured micro Bluetooth device fixed in his ear by an ENT surgeon, reported Hindustan Times.

just don't take their javascript

prasadjoglekar• 4 years ago

"After questioning by the college officials, one official reportedly said that he had a skin-coloured micro Bluetooth device fixed in his ear by an ENT surgeon, reported Hindustan Times."

This happened in India. The student was caught with a mobile phone, which in turn led to further questioning.

FastEatSlow• 4 years ago

The surgery was done by an ENT (ear, nose, throat) surgeon. I'm not sure if it was within the ear or not, as the device was "skin coloured", though that may be because of how thin the ear's skin is.

14• 4 years ago

When you hit a paywall you can try 12ft.io website just past a link in the box and it removes the paywall. It works for most paywalls.

toxik• 4 years ago

Feel like it should’ve been a false tooth instead. Perhaps of blue color.

arcticbull2• 4 years ago

With bone conduction audio via adjacent teeth, that would be achievable, less invasive and probably easier to avoid detection of.

[edit] omg [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundBite_Hearing_System

samstave4• 4 years ago

And a poison gas, when you bite down, blow it into the face of the Baron, and he will feel the revenge for killing my wife. A revenge so storng, even the Mind Conditioning for Loyalty cannot even contain my hate and revenge.

Zenbit_UX4• 4 years ago

Seems like the company went out of business because medicaid didn't cover it. I would be curious if such a device exists that could pair with a phone or laptop. A broken tooth could be capped with one of these false tooth implants and so long as there's a hygienic way to remove and clean + charge it I'd be very curious to try one.

bduerst• 4 years ago

If you're going to go the bone conduction route, then why not just bluetooth glasses?

https://www.amazon.com/bone-conduction-glasses/s?k=bone+cond...

starwind• 4 years ago

Thought you were talking about this at first: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3ca4tfXefk

exikyut2• 4 years ago

From WP:

SoundBite was developed and marketed by Sonitus Medical, Inc. The company filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, January 15, 2015,[1] as a result of the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' decision not to cover the device.[2]

jotm4• 4 years ago

Why not just waterproof it and keep it in your mouth, maybe temporarily affixed to a tooth...

recursiveturtle• 4 years ago

There's a $1000 in there... or maybe there isn't. Know what I mean?

warrenm• 4 years ago

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/

chaostheory• 4 years ago

They didn’t find the headset initially. They found the phone in an inner seam of his pants. I’m guessing that they used either metal or other detectors

geoffeg• 4 years ago

"Kent. Wake up Kent. I'm talking to you, Kent. This is Jesus, Kent, and you've been a very naughty boy."

dade_• 4 years ago

Dead maybe: Harald Bluetooth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Bluetooth

artful-hacker• 4 years ago

“The devices have been confiscated and their answer sheets were seized. They were given new answer sheets,” he said.

Unbelievable. They should have been banned forever.

gowld2• 4 years ago

It's pending investigation to document and confirm the facts.

An internal investigation has begun in the matter by the university examination committee and devices have been sent for examination.
After the conclusion of the investigation it would be determined whether the case merits a police case for using unfair means in an exam

inimino2• 4 years ago

They way they handled it was exactly the correct one. You allow the test to continue with the minimum of disruptions for everyone. The academic consequences come later, after a university investigation, and they may face criminal charges as well, but the people who didn't cheat deserve to have their test proceed with the minimum possible disruption.

spywaregorilla• 4 years ago

Minimum possible disruption is almost certainly taking him out of the room?

Frost1x• 4 years ago

they may face criminal charges as well

Criminal charges for cheating on an exam? Seems a bit absurd to me. I'm all for preventing fraud (especially when were talking about peoples lives), but I also like to think I'm a reasonable human being and criminal action seems unfounded here. It sounds to me like expectations and filters for exams are too unrealistic now combined with lack of alternative realizable opportunities, otherwise you wouldn't see this level of cheating nonsense.

Every day I see more and more ridiculous levels of competitive forces pushed on the bulk of society just to survive and it makes me wonder where the tipping point for social competitive forces for survival begin to exceed natural forces for survival and faith in societies destabilize to a point people just stop participating or at the very least many just "give up." You already see this in Japan, Korea, China (tang ping, "lying flat") and it seems to be an increasing trend in the US. I'm not intimately familiar with India but from what I have seen, it's not roses there either.

We have some fundamentally skewed power and control mechansim increasingly governing people in 'democratic societies' to which citizens seem to have little real democratic say in anymore.

savant_penguin• 4 years ago

That was the professor intent all along to teach students how to implant devices.

Just like when you are allowed a cheatsheet for the exam

awa• 4 years ago

Non paywall story: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/mp-student-gets-bl...

0des2• 4 years ago

If they did it themself just get them the green scrubs and the rest will fall into place.

Stackoverflow is about to get much more interesting.

skye-adaire• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/ntMYssVeyl0

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

When does it become 'biological enhancement'? Maybe all doctors should have a bluetooth implanted, to connect them to an AI or online consultants at all times?

samstave4• 4 years ago

Exactly ;

A favorite joke:

"One shouldn't do [that medical procedure], as GOD made you perfect and you shouldn't mess with God's! plan!!!"

Thats an interesting comment, may I ask - was God's plan to manufacture those glasses such that you can see clearly and read such from that book, made by man?

jotm4• 4 years ago

I used that argument for Jehova's witnesses and religious whatchacallthem on the streets... it's pointless

colinmhayes2• 4 years ago

In a similar vein...

A fellow was stuck on his rooftop in a flood. He was praying to God for help.

Soon a man in a rowboat came by and the fellow shouted to the man on the roof, “Jump in, I can save you.”

The stranded fellow shouted back, “No, it’s OK, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me.”

So the rowboat went on.

Then a motorboat came by. “The fellow in the motorboat shouted, “Jump in, I can save you.”

To this the stranded man said, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”

So the motorboat went on.

Then a helicopter came by and the pilot shouted down, “Grab this rope and I will lift you to safety.”

To this the stranded man again replied, “No thanks, I’m praying to God and he is going to save me. I have faith.”

So the helicopter reluctantly flew away.

Soon the water rose above the rooftop and the man drowned. He went to Heaven. He finally got his chance to discuss this whole situation with God, at which point he exclaimed, “I had faith in you but you didn’t save me, you let me drown. I don’t understand why!”

To this God replied, “I sent you a rowboat and a motorboat and a helicopter, what more did you expect?”

I know a few doctors who have told me they've used this one on people who refuse care for religious reasons. Unfortunately they said it rarely works.

airstrike• 4 years ago

*STARGATE SG-1 SPOILERS*

The first episode of Stargate I ever watched sorta touched on this... It's the season 7, episode 5 called "Revisions" with Christopher Heyerdahl. Definitely recommend. It got me hooked on the franchise forever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisions_(Stargate_SG-1)

snek_case2• 4 years ago

Looked this episode up on YouTube. Some quality TV right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_0O8zB5M_I&t=70s

adfgadfgaery• 4 years ago

An ordinary earpiece is better for all legitimate purposes.

snek_case2• 4 years ago

I'm curious what this "micro bluetooth" device looks like.

avgDev2• 4 years ago

I would give so much to see doctors who simply "google" things.

As someone who works as dev improving data and efficiency in a business.....i hate people who don't just google things. I implemented something a year ago, maybe its time to refresh my knowledge and see if anything has changed? Some doctors are infuriating, using knowledge they gained 10 years ago. Medicine also changes fairly quickly and quick search could really be a great tool.

Imagine this, I have seen many physicians (40+) at top hospitals about "mysterious" symptoms due to a reaction to a medication. 3 agreed its possible. The symptoms are listed on the medication label, plus I have been tested for everything else under the sun. I have sent research to my primary physician who has said, I am the first patient to change his mind about a drug. A quick search just listing my vague symptoms would bring up a possible reaction, or just looking at the damn label.

WalterBright2• 4 years ago

There's a lot of medical misinformation online, too.

Zenbit_UX4• 4 years ago

If been in a clinic where after describing my symptoms the doctor opened the computer and typed them into a search engine. I asked her if she was googling it and she said "sort of". She started telling me about a search tool doctor's use which is much more professionally focused than Google (who diagnoses everyone with cancer) and I was very impressed both with her honesty and that this existed.

It's been a few years since so I don't remember if it was a windows app or a website but it did have a very 90s looking interface.

otikik• 4 years ago

I caught a gastrointestinal parasite in one journey to Brazil (I should have avoided the street food!) and I am 90% sure that my Spanish doctor just googled what the hell I had when she got the results of the analysis, right there in front of me. I am not 100% sure because I could not see her screen, but the (in)frequency of mouse clicks was consistent with someone going over google and reading a bunch of pages. And then suddenly she started typing a lot and didn't use the mouse at all - switched to her daily medical app, I presumed.

The antibiotics she gave me did the trick. She was young, though.

jnovek• 4 years ago

I can’t agree with this enough.

I deal with daily chronic pain which has rendered me essentially unable to work. My full-time job has been “patient” for almost three years.

What I’ve learned is that you have to do their work for them if you want to make progress.

Sometimes that means showing up with highlighted printouts of studies that they would never get around to reading if you didn’t deliver them — and follow up on them — personally.

Other times that means that means playing dumb and “presenting” (not faking, just highlighting) the right preliminary symptoms to get a key test ordered.

I’m lucky in that I have education. I can read a study. I understand probability and statistics. I can learn terminology and use it (somewhat) correctly in a sentence. I often wonder how people without a STEM background get any care at all. Perhaps they don’t?

It’s a horrible, broken system that amounts to little more than insurance-mandated gatekeeping.

oceanplexian2• 4 years ago

I used to work in this industry. Medicine is the most broken, indoctrinated, risk-averse, technology-averse industry of them all. These are people who still use fax machines. Ask your doctor for some basic imaging or so much as a print out of your chart and they'll deny your problem, then give you confused dirty looks and talk down to you.

Compare that with Dentistry. I had a problem and walked in with an hour's notice, had a x-ray from a handheld scanner emailed to me with the problem highlighted within 5 minutes like something out of Star Trek.

withinboredom2• 4 years ago

That’s not exactly the industries fault though. For example, in the US, you have to get a mammogram BY LAW. It doesn’t even matter that there are better and more reliable methods to detect breast cancer, the law said it MUST be a mammogram. https://www.factcheck.org/2013/10/aca-doesnt-restrict-mammog....

Anyway, then you have companies like Theranos who come along and prove why it’s a good idea to be risk adverse. Snake oil has been sold for a long time, and it really isn’t until “recently” that it has been illegal to sell it (since a bit after 1906, in the US).

2muchcoffeeman• 4 years ago

Is this an American thing?

In Australia all imaging is stored on the cloud somewhere. For a reason unknown to me, you still get the huge envelope. But inside is just a piece of paper with some public id and a QRcode. You don’t really need these. The doctor who ordered the imaging will automatically get forwarded the results. If you are refereed to a specialist, they will get it to.

owenversteeg• 4 years ago

I agree, for some reason dentistry and orthodontics seem far more technologically advanced than the rest of medicine. In addition to handheld x-rays like you mentioned, I’ve seen dentists/orthodontists use 3D printers, 3D scanners (e.x. iTero Element) and modern composites. Small sample size, but all the orthodontists and dentists’ offices I’ve been in are clearly embracing new technology as much as they can, while every doctor’s office I’ve been in has seemed like it could be a hundred years old. I wonder why that is.

abeppu• 4 years ago

It's bad enough when hospitals get hacked. I can't imagine the problems that happen when the medical staff's 'biological enhancements' are hacked.

In this community we sometimes talk about how some technical interviews are deeply unrealistic because they remove the candidate from, e.g. their IDE with tab autocompletion, or googling, which you might normally depend on. Your skills are best measured when you have access to the tools and environment which you'd actually use while working. And yet ... sometimes you can pair program with someone and it's clear that they don't really understand what they're accepting from the autocomplete, and this is legitimate cause for concern.

I think I want doctors to definitely know a bunch of stuff unaided, even if they would normally always have access to supplementary references. If nothing else, they should have the habits of mind to be able to critically evaluate their references, and notice when they're wrong or suspect.

aaaaaaaaaaab• 4 years ago

Hmm… about 10 years ago I helped a friend pass an oral exam by talking to him over the phone. He had this “headset” that came in two parts: a tiny magnet that you insert into your ear canal, and a necklace that your put under your shirt, which was basically a large coil that vibrated the magnet in your ear.

samstave4• 4 years ago

My apologies for said joke:

I need you to help me pass an oral exam
>Whats the subject?
>>Biology
>>>uh... whats your gag relfex like?*

0des2• 4 years ago

2009

What's up with all the legacy accounts acting up lately?

MengerSponge• 4 years ago

Sounds like a re-tasked hearing aid

4a3f35b5a• 4 years ago

Would love to know more details about this!

- How did the "necklace" connect to a phone? (Since you were talking over the phone)

- Was it bidirectional communication? How did friend communicate with you?

tylergetsay2• 4 years ago

These are pretty easy to find online: https://www.ebay.com/itm/254882338954

Id rather fail an exam than put a tiny magnet into my ear in the hopes to get it back out...

endisneigh• 4 years ago

Should’ve just used Anki religiously for a year or so instead.

Speaking of cheating though, I heard they have directional speakers that have a spread of only like a foot. With something like that it seems like it’d be easy to cheat.

gowld2• 4 years ago

11 years, per the article.

jerf• 4 years ago

"Speaking of cheating though, I heard they have directional speakers that have a spread of only like a foot. With something like that it seems like it’d be easy to cheat."

Yeah, but they still spread enough to be audible, and the reflections are audible as well. In a testing environment it would be hard to completely hide.

I'm surprised so many people speak of these as something they haven't experienced. I recall at least two grocery stores I've been in using these to beam ads at people while they were in line, and that was years ago, and I'm not in SV either, it's not like people around here use cutting edge tech for the heck of it very often. Mercifully, they didn't last long. While I didn't enjoy the ads, I did enjoy the opportunity to hear exactly how they work and get a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.

(It is absolutely true that they are garbage at bass frequencies, and the lower midrange as well. The ads were all voiced by women, because I'm not sure men would even have been comprehensible. I mean that literally. Their lowest frequency response is that high. As clever as they are it's not a surprise we don't hear them more often. They are super specialist gear not suitable for most tasks.)

anotherman554• 4 years ago

I read a blog post once by someone who used Anki and was failing medical school, and didn't think Anki was a good tool for them.

beebmam2• 4 years ago

Cheating in college should be punishable with prison and heavy fines. It's essentially fraud. I certainly don't think doctors who earn their credentials through cheating should be allowed to practice in any sense

tmp_anon_22• 4 years ago

Its an open secret that tutors do a significant portion of work for star athletes, to say nothing about punishments being different for international students caught cheating.

slothtrop3• 4 years ago

Cheats are usually foreigners who pay more tuition, so they tolerate it. Pay-to-win.

cgrealy3• 4 years ago

There's a shocking amount of racism in this thread.

mbg721• 4 years ago

If I've learned anything from Columbo, it's that college students who cheat on exams eventually bite off more than they can chew by rigging their Jeep to shoot their criminology professor, and get their comeuppance from a wily homicide lieutenant who pretends to be their clueless buddy. So really you just have to bide your time.

ugh123• 4 years ago

Great episode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2maqg-LSE5s

pjbeam• 4 years ago

You want to take someone's freedom for cheating on an exam? That doesn't sit well with me at all.

tylergetsay2• 4 years ago

Theres no freedom to be a doctor

beebmam2• 4 years ago

The same could be said for people who fudge numbers to lie about income. Yes, honest society deserves to be protected from these frauds.

oceanplexian2• 4 years ago

If cheating with some bluetooth headset actually worked, something is deeply broken with your academic system. All that it proves is that you give out participation awards to people who can memorize facts over actual problem solving. Memorization doesn't take a lot of intelligence.

digitallyfree• 4 years ago

If the implant played back an audio recording of his notes or something, then sure. But if it allowed the student to communicate with a medical expert during the exam, then even an open-book exam not requiring memorization could be exploited that way.

ghaff• 4 years ago

My understanding is that there is quite a bit of memorization associated with certain things in medical school such as anatomy.

pessimizer2• 4 years ago

I think that cheating also causes a lot of programs to price cheating in, i.e. make the course harder because the cheating they don't detect gives them excessive expectations of students.

I saw this in my CS program (and heard about it from other programs.) None of the classes taught people to program, they just expected people to know how already, and as a pretense assigned everyone a programming instruction book (in the program's official language) that was never covered through lecture. The non-programmers would immediately start falling behind and cheating together to tread water. I definitely saw people graduate who had no ability to program; they were busy enough figuring out how to cheat.

an aside: CS programs are spoiled by hobbyist programmers like me who learned for fun when they were children, and they act as if everyone was a hobbyist. Plenty of people entering CS were just comfortable with math and liked playing video games. They foolishly expected to learn how to program at programming school.

bitwize• 4 years ago

If he did it himself I think he deserves extra credit, even if he gets a zero on the exam.

CraneWorm• 4 years ago

Students getting caught in mass cheating or deploying sly means to not get caught is not uncommon in India where competition is fierce as aspirants outnumber the number of vacancies for a job and seats in colleges for courses.

I'd like to read a long form piece on this subject. What's being done about it? India is a huge country, they need specialists no doubt!

genedan• 4 years ago

Economically, this puzzles me. I'd think that if quantity supplied were so high the equilibrium wage would drop to the point where excess people would stop trying to become doctors, or at least to the point where surgically implanting things wouldn't be worth the hassle. Is there something in India propping up wages for those professions?

sdeframond• 4 years ago

Maybe the number of licenses issued is limited by law? It is the case in France for example.

thawaya31132• 4 years ago

What matters is not the number of doctors but the number of doctors per capita.

India has both low number of doctors per capita, and low supply for educating doctors.

SQueeeeeL• 4 years ago

You'd also think the 40 hour work week would be a thing of the past with automation. People are just very good at building walked gardens and elite communities while forcing others to be "lower class"

pempem• 4 years ago

The ability to immigrate elsewhere with incentives skills from countries not incentivizing the growth of their own medical field for a number of reasons.

SkittyDog2• 4 years ago

Because it's not a "free market". The supply of doctors is legally limited... It's illegal to practice medicine without being licensed. And the number of licenses granted is limited.

The license limits could be direct, like taxi medallions in New York City... Or the limits can be indirect, like how the AMA defines the number of medical residencies in the United States.

Even in supposedly "free market" countries like the United States, we often have significant restrictions on all sorts of markets. The reasons vary.

supercheetah• 4 years ago

The hyper competitiveness seems to be a problem. I'm not sure what the answer is, but students need a way to be able fail honestly without shame so that when they do succeed, they do so without needing to cheat.

kodah• 4 years ago

He'd been taking the test for 11 years, that seems like allowing them to fail honestly.

firebird3• 4 years ago

It's a cultural thing. It's literally a do or die situation for everyone to do well in school. Or you would have shamed your family. But, things are getting better, as cultural expectations are subsiding. I think in the next couple decades, India will be on par with the West in terms of social expectations as the average gross income and GDP of the country continues to go up. I think China is starting to see the same thing now.

conradev• 4 years ago

This is a problem in the US: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4561/does-the-a...

colinmhayes2• 4 years ago

The doctor shortage in the US is because current law effectively limits the number of residency slots to 100k, pushing out foreign graduates who may have earned a spot and causing medical schools to expand slower than they would like due to fear of not matching graduates.

gunfighthacksaw• 4 years ago

It’s unfortunate because the exam cheater is such a prevalent stereotype, yet I have worked with many people from India who were deep thinkers with a love of their subject.

I wonder how many potential visionaries get filtered by association with these cheaters as well as more traditional racism.

YossarianFrPrez• 4 years ago

"The Mystery of India's Deadly Exam Scam" is an excellent piece on the subject: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/17/the-mystery-of...

scyzoryk_xyz• 4 years ago

My first thought wasn’t how did he do it, but how did he got caught.

Then it turned out that a squad came to interrogate and search which sounds ridiculous. And then it turned out that he admitted to it. And then another student was caught with a non-implant device.

Sounds ridiculous

VectorLock3• 4 years ago

If you've ever posted any job listings in tech recently you might have seen first hand how pervasive "fake it til you make it" is.

owlbynight• 4 years ago

Or if you've ever worked in tech, or interacted with any sales teams. My wife is looking to make a career change and I told her work in low level tech because it literally doesn't matter what you know. Nobody will know what you don't know.

abledon• 4 years ago

'low level' tech ? like writing drivers and stuff in C?

bencollier49• 4 years ago

It pays off for those people because eventually they'll run into a non-technical hirer, who'll take 2 months to realise that they've made a mistake. Rinse and repeat.

engineeringwoke3• 4 years ago

There are institutions that are absolutely filled with these kinds of people. It's pretty much a feature, not a bug, at those places. They perceive themselves as "hustlers" and that everyone else is doing it more than them.

oblio5• 4 years ago

Amusingly, there is also a huge cognitive dissonance between

1. people generally being against cheaters (and people also generally acknowledge that there are statistically significant amounts of cheaters)

2. people also generally (and probably with a decent overlap with the 1st group) being against hazing-style complex and difficult interview processes

rhines• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what the dissonance is? It's much easier to cheat in that sort of interview process than it is to cheat in a more free-form discussion interview. Of course you can simply lie in the latter, but assuming the interviewer is worth their salt they'll be able to ask questions that will be hard to answer if you don't have the experience you say you have. Whereas for algorithms and coding trivia questions you can search for answers online, have someone watching your screen and sending answers, do this bluetooth embedded approach, etc.

donatj• 4 years ago

A university squad of the Devi Ahilya Bai University came for a surprise check and they found one student with a mobile phone and another with some Bluetooth device

It's been 15+ years since I've been in any sort of major exams. Are surprise checks like this common these days?

karaterobot3• 4 years ago

The article did not explain how the device was used for cheating. I'm ready to assume that was his intent, but in what matter would it have been employed? Was he receiving answers from a third party? That seems easy to spot: just look for the guy who is reading the questions out loud.

Probably they should just have people go through a metal detector before the test, to identify all these hidden devices.

boomboomsubban3• 4 years ago

Probably they should just have people go through a metal detector before the test, to identify all these hidden devices.

How would a metal detector stop it? If you say the metal detector is picking up a piece of shrapnel from an accident while young, how can they really disprove that?

hutzlibu2• 4 years ago

"If you say the metal detector is picking up a piece of shrapnel from an accident while young, how can they really disprove that?"

X-Rays? MRI? Or requesting medical documents about it? (can all be done afterwards)

karaterobot3• 4 years ago

The same way metal detectors work in other places, like airports: if you set off the detector for a valid medical reason, you should be prepared to show the card your doctor gave you attesting to this fact.

humansuit• 4 years ago

Assuming the student implanted the device in their own ear, they did learn enough to be dangerous. They'll show up as a transhumanist influencer at best and a back alley surgeon at worst.

after_care2• 4 years ago

Is there any literature about implanting such a device?

oblio5• 4 years ago

Asking for a friend?

after_care2• 4 years ago

I'm curious because the last time I surveyed the literature of diy implantable devices there didn't seem to be anything on a power source strong enough for a bluetooth device to operate for hours at a time.

zeepzeep2• 4 years ago

Similar, this is about magnets in ears. https://forum.dangerousthings.com/t/tragus-implants-and-you-... https://forum.biohack.me/index.php?p=/discussion/2642/tragus... Both forums are the right place to find that info, though biohack.me is kinda dead.

cushychicken• 4 years ago

In a roundabout way: surgically implanting electronics arguably qualifies the perpetrator.

Though, I suppose if this was a test of their skill in cosmetic surgery, then detection certainly would count as a failure.

boomboomsubban3• 4 years ago

First, there's no reason to think the student implanted it themselves.

Second, I think most amateurs could probably cut someone open, put something in and stitch it up. Not causing further complications would be the hard part.

pugworthy• 4 years ago

I guess with my fully BTE integrated hearing aids I'd be suspected of cheating. If they even knew I had them on.

If you're not familiar with modern behind the ear hearing aids, Bluetooth is pretty common on better ones. It's like ear buds in an extremely discrete for that also happen to help you hear normally.

beeskneecaps• 4 years ago

That's so interesting. I (and I imagine many other people) wouldn't have the guts to confront you about removing your hearing aid, even if I knew that they had bluetooth capabilities.

chucknthem• 4 years ago

YC interviewer: "Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage?"

Medical student: "one time I hacked my ear..."

twayt3• 4 years ago

A lot of people are missing the bigger point here.

This person was just one who got caught. The likelihood that they’re the first one to think or do this is very low.

There are probably more sophisticated ways of using tech to cheat and I would be very surprised if they haven’t been employed in high stakes exams like this before.

duxup• 4 years ago

The article says stories of cheating are common.

I think the manner is what makes this story interesting.

ethanbond• 4 years ago

Obviously cheating happens all the time. What GP is saying is that this manner might not even be that extraordinary.

rdtsc• 4 years ago

Exactly. Then imagine the ones who didn't get caught enter the workforce and are the ones performing surgery or other life critical procedures.

fredoliveira• 4 years ago

and are the ones performing surgery

In fairness, this one person proved they can do implants :')

twayt3• 4 years ago

Yup, and their lack of moral compass combined with sufficient craftiness to hack the system could have major implications in the workforce. They'll be incompetent and unethical but hard to detect.

mmaunder6• 4 years ago

The community at DEF CON and other hacking cons have been playing with bio implants for some time, including low power RF. I came here to point out what you just said - that they got caught, which signals incompetence.

I do think the bio-implanted device space is going to explode at some point. Here's where I see us headed:

* VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.

* Once very portable VR becomes a thing, augmented reality wearable glasses. As in real-time, amazing visuals that are seamlessly stitched into your reality, and so advantageous you won't want to live without them.

* Then bio-implanted augmented reality with wireless charging through the skin.

That's how I see the next 30 to 50 years unfolding in terms of devices. The first step is VR as the next big platform play. Incidentally I see three spaces there:

1. VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]

2. 360 film [Already here but cameras getting WAY better very fast]

3. Immersive vision-based augmented reality - visuals overlaid on regular vision. [Not quite here - but we do have PoC's and will be in the next couple years]

sandworm101• 4 years ago

Futurama did it. Implanted vision devices have been a few years away, for decades. The nerve-wire interface isn't a simple problem.

https://youtu.be/uASUHbFEhWY

Zenbit_UX4• 4 years ago

I suspect VR porn will be a huge driver of this technology. The porn industry both has the money and the desire to push the envelope into new offerings.

I wouldn't be surprised if pornhub invests in VR in some way in the next 5-10 years.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

There was a dystopian poem in the 1980's that ended with someone unable to go to sleep at night because there was a constant blinking red light when he closed his eyes from the AT&T answering machine implant in his eye.

hammock3• 4 years ago

Earpieces were alleged during the last presidential debates[1] (fact checkers said this was false), and other places[2]. How would one detect an implant?

[1]https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-10-05-biden-wore-wire-with-...

[2]https://twitter.com/3ree6ixty/status/1352444645125414913?ref...

pas• 4 years ago

for true AR did anyone finally solve the problem of how to make black light or it's going to go through a camera + processing + display?

boredtofears• 4 years ago

VR synthetic reality. [Already here and super fun and useful]

Is it though?

vosper2• 4 years ago

VR next. If you don't have an Oculus Quest 2 or realize what a game changer it is in terms of price, power and wireless usability, you really need to get one, no matter what you think of Zuck and FB. It's the next thing. And it'll look clunky as hell 5 years from now. It's the suitcase-sized laptop of the early 90s.

I just got a Quest 2, and totally agree. It's incredible for what it can do for the price. And that it's untethered. Anyone who's into tech or interested in the future of tech should get themselves a Quest 2. The immersion level of games like Superhot VR was totally mind-blowing to me.

I also think it's the future of home workouts. If Peloton's not working on a VR system then they'll be done in five years.

trulyme• 4 years ago

Is there something like Oculus but... Well, in control of the user? Or at least less FB-y?

_0ffh• 4 years ago

I suspect that after augmented reality wearable glasses we'll transition to AR contact lenses first, and maybe even stay there, before we go to full-on implants.

xorcist• 4 years ago

Implants may be coming sooner or later but the rest of society doesn't stand still, and as we extrapolate trends into the future, one thing seems very clear:

You will not own the implants in your body.

They will be owned by a separate third party. You may still pay for them, and you may get some value out of the proposition, but they will not be under your control.

That's perhaps the most important aspect of our future.

tsimionescu• 4 years ago

Never understand why people imagine this progression. I love gaming, but wouldn't really see the need to implant a PS4 into my body even if it were small enough. And outside gaming and entertainment in general, VR just doesn't have any compelling use cases. Even in gaming, VR controls are still horrible, and games are actually more limited in the range of actions your character can take - since there just aren't enough buttons on any controller to simultaneously move and interact fully enough.

Not to mention that a good 10% or more of people get violently motion sick from using VR.

eunos2• 4 years ago

In a few decades, critical exams might be held in rooms that practically are Faraday cages.

praptak• 4 years ago

Also a full body CT scan in case the device is self-contained.

thrdbndndn• 4 years ago

"High stake" exams in my country already have radio jamming devices for years.

busyant3• 4 years ago

About 5 years ago, I had 3 students who worked as a team to cheat.

* The ringleader placed his iPhone under his leg.

* He would lean back in his chair and hold the exam sheets up in the air. It looked a little unusual, but it (initially) seemed innocuous.

* What he was really doing was pointing the sheets downward toward the camera peeking out from under his leg.

* He was broadcasting the exam to God-knows-where.

* He and the other two students then received answers via tiny earpieces.

* In addition, the two other students would call me over to "ask clarification questions." In reality, they were trying to distract me while the ringleader broadcast the exam.

* I eventually realized they were cheating (after exam 1), but I couldn't figure out how, until another student (exam 2) approached me with a note that read, "The guy to my right has his phone under his leg. Every time you circle the room, he pushes it completely under his leg so you can't see it."

* At that point, however, each student was taking a slightly different exam (unbeknownst to them).

The ringleader emailed me at the end of the semester and said something to the effect of: "I know I don't deserve to pass, but if you fail me, I will have to stay an extra semester."

I ended up failing all three.

mehphp• 4 years ago

Failed? I’m surprised expulsion wasn’t on the table.

pastaguy1• 4 years ago

I proctored an exam once in an auditorium. You could kind of see over the person in front of you's shoulder even though they sat every other seat or whatever. I'm pretty sure there was a group of friends sitting in a six deep echelon formation as some kind of cheating daisy chain but I could never prove it.

mordae• 4 years ago

What fascinates me is that everyone always separate into just two camps:

1. Cool! Tell me more! I love these puzzle/strategy games. Both how to cheat and not get caught and how to catch the cheaters.

2. Wow, these cheaters are such a bad people. Isn't it unfair to those who don't cheat...?

For once, I would love for someone to step back and ask:

What the actual fuck is going on here?

Some people are apparently spending up to 11 years (on top of high school) trying to get a certificate, that would help them maintain certain socioeconomic status. Other people are actively preventing them in getting the certificate in other ways than the official ones.

This costs an incredible amount of money. The whole overhead is insane. Whole lot of people routinely spend several YEARS without actually receiving the certificate. College education is crippled, because it needs to prevent fraud first, teach people useful things second.

Can't we do the sensible thing and lift the minimum income high enough so that only those who want to study will go to college and do so without fear of missing out?

basisword• 4 years ago

You really don’t need high tech to cheat in exams. I was studying a few years ago (I was a mature student) and there were a few kids who took 3-4 toilet visits in a 2 hour exam to review notes on their phones after seeing the questions. The school can’t search you before the exam (i.e they can’t stop you carrying a phone) and they can’t watch you in a toilet cubicle. All these kids did well in their degree despite being idiots in classes and lectures.

Maursault• 4 years ago

You really don’t need high tech to cheat in exams.

Although now ubiquitous, excluding two cups and a string, phones have always been high tech, as opposed to low tech, like feigning a need to use the restroom to develop their cheating space, as obvious and overused as it is. I wonder who first pioneered the fake bathroom visit for cheating, as opposed to it being employed as an escape from the extreme pressures of the classroom, i.e. smoking.

krageon3• 4 years ago

I don't know that this is an option everywhere. It is categorically not allowed to use the toilet during an exam here, so this is a thing that you cannot do.

kelnos2• 4 years ago

This was my first thought, but I'm skeptical this ends up being as bad a problem as you imply. You don't just pass an exam and then immediately get sent to an operating theater and given a scalpel. You do a medical internship and residency, and are supervised by experienced doctors. (Yes, I know, this is the US system, but I'd hope the systems in other countries would be similar, or at least provide similar protections.) I would expect a cheater like this might not perform well enough to ever make it into an operating room. And even if they did, it would only be in an assistant role, where they would likely show their incompetence pretty quickly.

Sure, the system overall isn't perfect, but detecting incompetence on the job (before being allowed to do any damage) is IMO the most likely scenario for cheating medical students who don't get caught at school.

Even if we consider other disciplines... say, civil engineering. You don't get your degree and then immediately get the job of Principal Engineer on a bridge-building project. You're supervised by engineers with more experience, and your work is checked and signed off on if it's correct. If your work consistently fails those checks, you'll get fired.

moonchrome• 4 years ago

I would expect a cheater like this might not perform well enough to ever make it into an operating room.

Implying that material they are testing is relevant in a practical setting ? I actually wonder if they ever do something like random tests for people that are 5+ years into their career - just unannounced testing to check retention and relevance.

If it's anything like CS I wouldn't be surprised if they would fail >90% people. People here complain about having to invert binary trees in an interview...

AlexCoventry• 4 years ago

From the Fine Article:

Dr Anand Rai, the whistleblower in the Vyapam scam [of 2008-2013], said: “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed. Such a technique was used by a Vyapam scam accused too to clear his medical exam eight years ago.”

tomxor• 4 years ago

An even bigger point is being missed... the underlying cause, the societal pressure to get a degree in india is so great that people will do almost anything.

twayt3• 4 years ago

Yea but how about the lower stakes examinations in more developed country with less selectivity pressure like the US? The incentive to cheat if you're a poor performer is still high.

I shudder to think how many future doctors with a poor moral compass are getting through the system. Not only is their incompetence dangerous, their lack of ethics and craftiness could mean that they'll be harder to detect.

greggman3• 4 years ago

Whether the story is true or not, I think there's an even bigger point. I believe augmentation is coming. There will be a time in the not too distant future when disabling communication for almost anything else will be near unthinkable. I can imagine kids growing up with instant access to info and communication via neural link to feel threatened/stressed/horrified to be disconnected, similar to tearing a child away from its parent.

I'm not making a judgement whether that's good or bad. I'm sure plenty will chime in with their opinion. I'm only bringing up the world of always on computing is probably coming and schools will need to find some other way to test students that don't require handicapping them by removing what they perceive as part of their brain.

throwawayboise• 4 years ago

Sounds like the borg collective. No thanks.

Cpoll• 4 years ago

If you get used to it at a young age, it probably won't be the traumatic thing you describe. E.g. have Faraday cage test booths in schools starting as early as Grade 1.

Won't help much with recordings, of course, but that's more like a cheat sheet that's always on you; if you can succeed with it in a well-designed test environment, you can probably succeed with it in real life. At some point, if you're augmented, then memory is memory and there's no point in distinguishing between hardware and wetware.

datavirtue2• 4 years ago

I feel like I'm cheating when I just memorize shit. I blame the system if this many people are cheating.

jcadam• 4 years ago

One of the wackier pitches in an early season of Shark Tank was similar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDkDg33uGuc

My favorite part is when he describes the recharging procedure :D

bsenftner• 4 years ago

I wager this guy is fielding calls from screenwriters about now. This would be a good comedy.

nonrandomstring• 4 years ago

We are in an arms race now. Turnitin. Proctoring. Next? Airport style security scanners at the exam hall. I wrote about this arms race recently [1] and where it will lead.

The problem is really that, under conditions of self-commodification (reification), intrinsic motivation to learn and be a better person is replaced by extrinsic motivation to appear to be a better person. The experience (simulation) means more than the reality - which is a general trend in Western society now proved by the very existence of the company Meta.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...

jimbob45• 4 years ago

It seems to me that TurnItIn and proctoring take care of 99% of problems in exams if the exams are well-constructed such that consulting hidden notes wouldn't help much.

The 1% of exams that remain problematic are the memorization-style exams that maybe shouldn't still exist in the modern age.

jvanderbot• 4 years ago

Right. there are plenty of exams in tech that require plain old practice and on-the-spot ingenuity. However, for medical and other fields, memorization and recall is key, so it's rife for this kind of cheating.

But honestly, if someone were to tattoo the same information onto their arm, there's an argument to be made it was permanently accessible just as much as memory.

BitwiseFool• 4 years ago

To an extent, yes. As a programmer who can't remember the syntax for declaring a two dimensional array and populating it with hard-coded strings, I feel somewhat hypocritical when I say that Medicine seems to be valid domain for rote memorization.

imoverclocked• 4 years ago

Sometimes memorization itself is important to a role. How would you test for that, if not an exam that tests memorized facts?

From recent personal experience: pilots need to know certain information so that it can be employed on a whim to help solve time-critical problems. The written exam (which precedes a practical exam) definitely requires memorization.

Fogest2• 4 years ago

Some courses seem to put far too much emphasis on the memorization aspect of the courses, which has always seemed silly to me. For so many jobs you are not required to memorize a ton of information and instead can refer to manuals, textbooks, the internet, etc... for those kinds of things. These are also typically the things people forget shortly after the exam, which begs the question of how useful it even is in the first place. For example, I tried out an "Intro to sociology" class. It was a horrible class, and over half the exams questions were things like "Which person came up with xyz theory". Or "What year was xyz theory proposed". So many questions were purely memorization and did little to actually test your understanding of those theories.

What I remember out of most courses is not the things I had to memorize, but instead it is the practical components. Those should be the takeaways and things that get tested. Many people also just sucked at memorizing things like that, and I can totally see why cheating is such a problem on these kinds of tests.

Some of the bests tests I've taken where I've remembered the most material have been open book tests that allowed me to use all my textbooks and notes that I had taken. They were hard tests which really tested the understanding of the course material.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Memorization of "raw" facts has become quite easy with spaced-repetition tools like Anki. The best performance on the job always comes from putting together raw memory and deep conceptual understanding. Neither of these is useful without the other.

andrewzah• 4 years ago

Intro classes (i.e. 101 or just 100-level classes) are designed to weed out people or fill cross-class requirements for majors. My degree required some "aesthetic" classes so I took Dance 101; the class was comprised of a diversity of majors + athletes looking for an easy course. It's also a -lot- of work to grade 150-200 students' tests, and they might change their major anyways.

Nearly every course I took at a 300/400+ level was about demonstrating a fundamental understanding instead of strict memorization. Open-book tests were more common. And it went down from 150+ students to 20 or 4. Considering my degree is a b.a. in media arts, some senior courses had minimal or no testing at all and instead had large projects.

That said, perhaps one of the hardest classes I took was a 300 or 400 level one on Tarantino films, probably to weed out people who were just looking for an easy class. On top of demonstrating understanding through analysis via storyboarding or papers, the quizzes/tests had multiple choice of 5 answers, which always included "all of the above" or "none of the above", and short/long answers/prompts. You really had to have studied each lecture and actually have watched the relevant films. You wouldn't believe how many people didn't watch the films... in a film analysis class. But all of that aside, it was thoroughly interesting and memorable.

simion314• 4 years ago

Students cheated with phones and hidden small speakers at exams that are not about reproducing stuff from memory, the student would tell the friend on the other side the question and somehow the friend would find or know the correct answer.

eitally3• 4 years ago

I think there needs to be acknowledgement that there are two different learning tracks in higher education - one that is facts & figures, and one that is experiential. For better or worse, most institutions treat success in facts & figures as a high quality proxy indicating future success in the experiential areas, which includes everything from how an individual knows how to learn & how to teach themselves, to how they effectively build relationships and collaborate with others. Speaking as someone both liberal arts & technical degrees, and technical & business leadership experience over 20 years in manufacturing & big tech, my assessment is that this is ridiculous. Of course there will always be a need for "human computers" -- people who specialize in functions requiring programmatic, fact-based work -- but most jobs are not like this, and most individuals who prefer this type of work would generally benefit from expanding their comfort and capacity in human-centric skills.

To this end, I agree vigorously that the current state of higher education is both unsustainable and insane, but I think the end game will be more private enterprise & public sector employers deciding to expand intern & apprenticeship programs as an alternative to being constrained in hiring to the pipeline of candidates emerging from top universities. We'll see.

robocat• 4 years ago

I can understand one motivation to cheat: exam grading is very unfair at the individual level because your performance has a high variation depending on factors outside of your control. Those factors are random from the perspective of a test taker: the exact questions, whether you had a flu, family circumstances, and hundreds of other factors that are independent of your ability. Apart from the fact that exams strongly measure the skill of passing exams, yet often poorly measure actual ability for the subject.

The unfairness depends on how steep the cutoff is: does 89.9% mean you miss out on an important life goal, whereas 90.1% means you win?

I did a quick google to find facts on expected individual exam mark volatility, but couldn’t find anything - what keywords do I need?

One pattern to the results I did read is that individual volatility is not even acknowledged - the unwritten assumption is that exams are completely fair and volatility has other dominant causes.

Edit: I am an engineer type with some spectrum attributes and I loath cheats, but over time I have seen how important some “dark” skills are such as: deception, judging when to ignore rules, and meta-games. In some roles or countries, perhaps cheating is a good quality? There is a reason the best card games are about deception. Cheaters are also risk takers, and taking appropriate risks is associated with entrepreneurship. Risks with extreme downsides are interesting.

CrazyStat• 4 years ago

Based on my experience teaching I don't think individual variability is that large. In a semester-long course with 3 or 4 exams the top students and bottom students are mostly consistent from exam to exam.

That said, of course individual variability does exist. In one graduate-level math class I misremembered one theorem which caused me to immediately lose 40/100 points--there were only 5 questions on the exam, and that theorem was central to two of them. Had those two questions been different I probably would have scored much better. I consider that a poorly-written exam, though, since so much of the score was dependent on recalling one theorem correctly. I somehow still ended up with an A in that course, I can only assume through either creative accounting or a generous grading curve.

In any case, I don't know any other method of evaluation which is more fair than exams. Every method of evaluation is subject to similar sources of individual variability and some have other issues in addition. "Fair" in such cases is a mirage. It's not like there's some other objective evaluation that we can use instead of exams, just ones with different biases.

criddell2• 4 years ago

It's also worth thinking about why we use tests and what they actually measure.

Malcolm Gladwell (yes, I know) did a podcast[1] on the LSAT that's pretty good. In that podcast, he makes a pretty compelling argument that what the test measures isn't very useful.

[1] https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/the-tortoise-and-the-hare/

jcranberry• 4 years ago

The LSAT is probably one of the few tests where what it measures is directly useful to a prospective lawyer. I find it hard to believe that he can show that reading comprehension, logical ability and analytical ability aren't useful to law school admissions.

908B64B1972• 4 years ago

We are in an arms race now. Turnitin. Proctoring. Next? Airport style security scanners at the exam hall. I wrote about this arms race recently [1] and where it will lead.

This is completely self-inflicted. When the map becomes the territory and exams are lazily written to reward rote, you are no longer testing for reasoning and understanding.

See Caltech as the exact counterpoint with its culture of take home exams and honesty.

dikei• 4 years ago

Not the full body scanner used by the America's TSA, but the TOEIC testing centers in my country already require candidates to pass through a metal detector when entering the testing room.

firebird3• 4 years ago

How did I know this man was Indian or was in India? Lol.

firebird3• 4 years ago

fyi I am too.

geodel• 4 years ago

It's simple. Medical students from India like bluetooth implants.

srvmshr• 4 years ago

In my undergrad days, my sibling's medical college (KMC Mangalore) had an interesting case where the student had hired the service of a rice-engraving artist to etch complete medical manuals onto the sides of metallic ballpoint pens. He was wearing a high powered lens as bifocals.

He was caught because he was noticed shuffling a wad of pens too often & then the bifocal glasses were peculiar, prompting some investigation.

He had paid the grain-engraving artist to the tune of $30,000-35,000 for the whole set (2006). It is a lot of money!

exikyut2• 4 years ago

The massive irony is that the rice-engraving artist may well have then stood the chance to get a decent head start in medicine. I've long theorized that copying/transcribing information can be a great way to meditate in a way conducive to retaining and learning new data.

Depends on their skill level, and how much focus there was on the process of engraving vs temporarily memorizing the next block of info to transcribe.

agumonkey4• 4 years ago

I never went to med school, but in HS I had my beloved modded HP48 that could store loads of text. I didn't manage to wire it to my computer so I resorted to type everything manually.

After a whole day of char-by-char input.. I knew everything by heart and didn't need to look it up in the calculator.

glfharris2• 4 years ago

How is that any different from the rote memorisation that's been the mainstay of most education systems up to the 21st century?

It doesn't really aid understanding, doesn't incorporate active recall, and tends to become inefficient for a large corpus of knowledge.

datavirtue2• 4 years ago

I have to learn maths by engraving the algorithms in source code.

chx• 4 years ago

At university one of the exams allowed a single sheet of handwritten paper to be brought in. People got real damn creative in squeezing as much information they could on it, completely oblivious to the fact they actually learned the subject matter while preparing their "cheat sheet".

adhesive_wombat2• 4 years ago

Brb learning rice engraving. Or maybe I'll just buy a laser engraver.

lnxg33k12• 4 years ago

Wow, when I was young my father sold bijoux and he also used to create necklaces and bracelet on the fly with names of people written on grain of rice, he used to sell those for like 5.000 liras (in Italy, in the 90s, before euros, it would be 2.50 euros right now), if I knew I would have told him to start offering his services to cheating students, instead of tourists in Positano :D

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

You missed the bit where L5.000 became €5.

cortesoft3• 4 years ago

The bigger question is why are we testing for things that can be looked up that quickly on a tiny grain of rice that probably doesn't have a good indexing system?

Like, if there was a question that was easy to answer if you could look at a reference sheet, then why is it important to memorize it? If the test take could understand the question enough to know where to look it up, isn't that good enough?

hokumguru2• 4 years ago

Because in the medical field peoples' lives are literally at stake. Doctors absolutely do research for their patients in the real world but a base level of knowledge is still absolutely required. If someone is not able to answer the "easy" questions then how do we know that they won't falter when faced with an actual challenging one.

Would you hire an engineer who couldn't write a FizzBuzz without looking it up?

Rygian• 4 years ago

How comfortable would you be if your ER doctor went to look something up while you were in need of urgent care?

throwaway815236• 4 years ago

I think that could have been done with photo reduction?

yiyv• 4 years ago

Considering for how much KMC sold its seats back then I’d say 30K USD was still a bargain.

Now their engineering school’s seats are sold for more than that.

wildmanx• 4 years ago

Just for completeness since I didn't find a comment yet mentioning it: Time to turn exam halls into Faraday cages.

whateveracct• 4 years ago

Not surprising. A lot of med students are status- and money-seeking people first and foremost.

That's why you gotta shop around for doctors when you can and evaluate them as people.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

At what point will we start to accept human cybernetic enhancement as legitimate? We are literally one technological step away from all humans being able to communicate telepathically. Society is going to have to adapt to this reality. If a test can be gamed this easily, then it is a very poor test and I would not trust its' filtering ability at all moving forward. Rote learning will be a thing of the past once we are all augmented with the entirety of human knowledge accessible by thought.

oblio5• 4 years ago

We are "one technological step" away from many things.

Fermat's last theorem was formulated in 1637 and proven in 1995, 358 years later. In those 358 years we can assume that at least 4 very long lived generations of people lived (more like 6-10 based on average life expectancies at the time).

Being "close" to something doesn't mean anything. Doing it is the real challenge. Everything before that is wishful thinking.

cgrealy3• 4 years ago

Even if we don't have direct computer to brain comms yet, the fact remains that most people now have constant access to any information accessible on the internet.

At some point, we are going to have to figure out how to test understanding instead of knowledge.

I distinctly remember being asked "what is the win32 function that does X" in an interview many years ago. My answer was "no idea, that's what msdn is for".

bredren• 4 years ago

Bringing this home—there is a Pycharm integration for Leetcode right now.

But it is reasonable that any programmer familiar with the assistance of an IDE would want the syntax highlighting, formatting and more mapped into the browser during live coding exercises.

IncRnd• 4 years ago

The medical student who found a surgeon to implant bluetooth in his ear could have instead paid that surgeon for tutoring and kept his ear canal open.

balls187• 4 years ago

Reminds me of programming in physics formulas in a Ti-83.

Turns out, the act of programming the formula made it easy for me to recall it without cheating.

eunos2• 4 years ago

This remind me of how strict Chinese national exams are (Gaokao). They even have signal jammers to prevent external communication.

jupp0r• 4 years ago

Time for exams that test your understanding of the field instead of just test whether you have crammed a lot of unrelated facts into your brain.

vjust• 4 years ago

Maybe the dude needs to be working on a bio-tech / wearable-computing startup... if he's willing to go this far. But I guess its a moral stain. If its his 11th year, why not pass him for his sheer persistence.

lmarcos• 4 years ago

I still remember the exams I had to pass when I was studying computer science. In some cases, professors let you take to the exam any material, books or notes you wanted; the point was: You are not going to pass the exam unless you understand the concepts, so there is no room for cheating.

adhesive_wombat2• 4 years ago

Yep, an open book exam is basically the perfect weapon against cheating. Plus for almost all subjects, including a lot of medicine actually, memorising stuff is not helpful in the field. If it's that important, you should double check anyway.

The downside to open book exams is they can take a lot more effort to mark. And actually paying attention to filthy undergraduates is a bit infra dig, dontcha know?

ookdatnog• 4 years ago

When you have a direct line of communication with an outsider, open book or not doesn't matter, it's literally someone else taking the test for you.

granshaw• 4 years ago

I remember those and they were such a breath of fresh air. Just like coding interviews where you’re allowed to lookup docs, which is the case on the job

cortesoft3• 4 years ago

Yeah, I don't understand these sorts of memorization exams any more than I understand the "code this without using the internet" challenges for interviewing candidates... why is this an important skill to have?

nnm• 4 years ago

A way to avoid this is to make it possible to fail. I mean, when one fails medical exam, not too much pressure / shame on the student -- they can simply do other type of work.

Firmwarrior• 4 years ago

Man, that's an interesting point

If you fail the Google entrance exam, you can retake it and/or work at any of a dozen of other great careers

Slow_Hand• 4 years ago

If we are to assume that bluetooth implants and other embedded tech that can prompt a user near-instantly with information are an eventuality, I think there is an interesting question to consider:

If everyday people have near-instant access to information, how will we continue to assess expertise moving forward? Surely it’s not enough to just have access to rote information, like in the case of the cheating test-taker. We will also expect our experts to have the deep understanding that comes from experience in a domain.

Will we need different language to describe flavors of knowledge and expertise? If so, will the nature of test-taking and assessment need to evolve to identify people who actually have an understanding of the thing being tested, instead of testing for rote answers?

ricardobeat• 4 years ago

Isn’t this already the case? At least in my experience interviewing for software development, all the questions are meant to test understanding and the ability to explore and solve problems, never static knowledge.

rocqua• 4 years ago

Rote regurgitation is only useful for teaching the basics, not advanced stuff. I propose testing this, asking students not to cheat, and catching cheaters later, in case they screwed themselves by skipping the basics.

Why do math students need to know the sine doubling rule? Not so they can calculate with it (they could look that up) but so they can reduce certain expressions to sin(2x). That's why calculus teaches this stuff.

murderfs• 4 years ago

Why do math students need to know the sine doubling rule? Not so they can calculate with it (they could look that up) but so they can reduce certain expressions to sin(2x). That's why calculus teaches this stuff.

Why make math students memorize random trigonometric identities that they'll use once and then immediately forget when you could teach them a more general fact that they can derive the identities from?

  sin(2x) = Im(cos 2x + i sin 2x)
          = Im(e^2ix)
          = Im(e^ix * e^ix)
          = Im((cos x + i sin x)^2)
          = Im(cos^2 x + 2i cos x sin x + sin^2 x)
          = Im(cos^2 x - sin^2 x + 2i cos x sin x)
          = 2 cos x sin x

throwaway0a5e2• 4 years ago

If everyday people have near-instant access to information, how will we continue to assess expertise moving forward? Surely it’s not enough to just have access to rote information, like in the case of the cheating test-taker. We will also expect our experts to have the deep understanding that comes from experience in a domain.

We've always expected professionals to have an understanding. We've just been using memorization as a proxy for this.

Any 14yo with a cell phone can go on Reddit give you caned advise about investments or why your car is making a funny noise. But we don't trust teenagers googling stuff with those sorts of things in the real world because there's a huge difference between being able to pattern match information and actually understanding what's going on hence why we don't get advice we care about from anonymous people with backgrounds that can't be vetted

Professional education has a filter in front of it so it's going to be behind the curve when it comes to reckoning with the realities of information access in the modern age but it'll have to figure something better than tests out eventually.

wiz21c• 4 years ago

Access to knowledge is one thing, having understanding is another. I guess we'll just move to problem solving exams rather than knowledge exams...

joshmarlow• 4 years ago

how will we continue to assess expertise moving forward?

This reminds me of something that I read once - allegedly Aristotle was actually against books; he believed that having ready access to books made it easy to 'fake' the type of education that requires mentorship.

I think Aristotle's perspective doesn't really make sense today because (for better or worse) we emphasize the economic utility of education - is the person actually able to do the job that they claim to be able to? We don't consider the internal changes to the person caused by their education (alas...).

We will also expect our experts to have the deep understanding that comes from experience in a domain.

I think Chalmer's concept of the extended mind is an interesting framing here - basically it's the notion that your mind doesn't end right at your skull. For the sake of argument, let's assume in the future that we'll have BCI that's good enough to let you text with you mind (something like what Neuralink is going for). If you've got an expert system in your head/pocket that's really good at dealing with some domain and you're really good at _phrasing problems in terms that the expert system can understand_ then you + expert system might have a super-human ability to solve problems in that domain.

If I was hiring for that domain, I wouldn't particularly mind how much of your expertise is in biological tissue.

jcranmer2• 4 years ago

This reminds me of something that I read once - allegedly Aristotle was actually against books; he believed that having ready access to books made it easy to 'fake' the type of education that requires mentorship.

I think that was Socrates, not Aristotle. Socrates was very firmly against the concept of writing, and we know all about this only because his student was writing down what the teacher was telling him.

moosey• 4 years ago

We already have the language to describe someone who claims an expertise in a knowledge area without the study necessary to be an actual expert: dilettante.

And that's all that we'll actually be without memorization. There is a huge gap between someone with knowledge and expertise ingrained in their head, with a solid knowledge of the gaps in their knowledge, or understanding the layout of a knowledge realm that can only come from dedicated study of a subject, vs a dabbler or whatever level of expertise another individual might have with less stringent studies.

This same problem exists in our education system and cramming. You can cram subjects and pass tests, but research had shown that the knowledge gain from this process to be extremely limited.

Without a well ingrained knowledge of a subject, it is difficult to use that knowledge in creative thought, connecting with other realms of knowledge.

If all of these human mental processes are replaced with computation, and people no longer put in the effort to learn challenging things, then I predict large amounts of mental decline. We may already be seeing this process. Perhaps I should say... "As we offload more mental processing to computers...", Because it's definitely a process that many people are going through.

That isn't too say that computerized information is all bad. My wife would probably leave me if I didn't have a calendar app.

qgin• 4 years ago

I doubt many programmers on HN could do their jobs without Google.

closetohome2• 4 years ago

Every college class I had that taught something worth knowing ended with a test that allowed access to any notes you wanted, as the point was to demonstrate that you had internalized concepts, not just memorized facts.

WhyNotHugo• 4 years ago

The way exams work is already terribly outdated for many areas of expertise. Which is why companies no longer take a single written exam when interviewing professionals, but face-to-face interviews discussing topics. Academia has yet to catch up in many domains.

whoomp123422• 4 years ago

Keep making people memorize things!

softwarebeware• 4 years ago

In my experience you can easily tell the difference between someone who knows what they're talking about and someone who just googles what they're talking about. I have a feeling that won't change even when people have implants.

raincom• 4 years ago

Another story [1] from 2017, where some guy who already cheated to become an IPS officer, tried to cheat again to become IAS. IPS (Indian Police Service), IAS(Indian Administrative Service), etc are legacy of the British Raj and their ICS (Indian civil service). Once you get through these exams, you will end being the top level bureaucrats in India. These officials collude with ministers to become super rich.

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/ips-officer-caught-che...

newsclues• 4 years ago

The failure of ethics is most troubling, because how can we solve it?

sonicggg• 4 years ago

This is probably way more pervasive than we imagine.

Several years ago they uncovered a large SAT cheating scheme, out of Thailand. They even made a movie about it : https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/bad_genius

And that was using way more rudimentary technology. There are a lot of rich kids willing to pay their way to a deegre.

FpUser• 4 years ago

When I was in university we had that peculiar professor for Quantum Mech. He would let you choose any question sheet and use books to consult. And after you say you are ready he would briefly look at your answers and will fry your brain with the questions till you are dead. Usually all my university exams were 4s and 5s out of 5. I got 3 on quantum mech and considered myself extremely happy. Drank myself to death after that. Many of the people would be just told go home, study and return some other time. Phew.

No gadget will save you from examiner like that one.

mc4ndr3• 4 years ago

If the student had performed the surgery, that would have at least counted for something.

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

I'm extremely skeptical of this story, at least as written.

It makes great clickbait, but it doesn't really make sense. Where would someone implant a bluetooth earpiece into their ear? There's not really a lot of empty space in that area unless someone is very overweight and the device is implanted in layers of fat adjacent to the ear, which aren't great at conducting sound. Did someone really wrap an earpiece in some bio-compatible material, put it in someone right before the test (battery life is limited), and that person was then in a low enough level of pain and/or on enough painkillers that they could still complete the test? I'm extremely doubtful.

But the bigger question is: What use is a 1-way communication device? Did the student have a second cheating instrument to photograph the test and send it to someone off-site? Or did they have someone with the test answers reading them off in real-time ("Question 34 - Answer is C")? It seems this would only be useful in an extremely narrow set of circumstances, if it could be pulled off at all.

Really though, why wouldn't someone just grow out their hair or wear a wig and put an earpiece under their hair? The idea of surgically implanting something that could be easily concealed seems like a modern urban legend.

nathanyukai• 4 years ago

1-way communication device are used in cheating all the time, it involves of someone that's really good at exams taking the same test, sneak out to the toilet and tell them the answers.

cortesoft3• 4 years ago

But aren't these sorts of tests usually randomized so that people next to each other aren't taking the same exact test?

GekkePrutser9• 4 years ago

Bluetooth range on headsets is pretty mediocre though. Especially when blocked by body parts. I've never done an exam where the toilets were within Bluetooth range.

tempnow987• 4 years ago

My licensing exam was computer adaptive. We were wanded, turned pockets inside out, videoed. You couldn't eat, take jackets on our off or anything. Lots of rules around how you sat at the table. These must be a fair bit lower tech for the cheating to work. You could wear earplugs and earmuf style sound suppression which I did. Wouldn't be super difficult to have audio in -> but I don't think it would have done much good.

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

What use is a 1-way communication device?

Lots of dumb questions on exams that are predictable rote dumps that take away from studying other material.

E.g. a blank page that asks “Draw and label the Kreb’s cycle. Do not use abbreviations”

Izkata2• 4 years ago

Draw

Over audio, interesting challenge.

closetohome2• 4 years ago

Another article I found clarified that this was an induction style micro earpiece (which google helpfully suggested suffixing with "for cheating") that had apparently been inserted by an ENT due to its size and depth in the ear canal. No actual surgery involved.

Since this is an incredibly common and mundane method of cheating I'd have to say you're right, the headline is entirely clickbait.

dheera• 4 years ago

I guess my question is, if your body has built-in superpowers like Bluetooth or infrared vision or auxilary information storage, why would it be illegal to use them if it would make you a better doctor?

Maybe the tests are not testing the right skills.

As a patient I want to see the best doctor possible, and if they have retrofitted their bodies to be more competent at treating conditions I would totally want that.

thih9• 4 years ago

A bluetooth implant alone doesn’t help that much. To be effective the scam requires more, e.g. continuous assistance from a third party. Will that doctor employ a third party afterwards, i.e. for all duration of their practice?

kemitche• 4 years ago

Your assumption is that these cheating students will continue to have an enabler with them through their entire career.

Furthermore, your assumption is that a cheater will be the best doctor. It's not about the method - it's about the integrity. My assumption is that any person taking shortcuts like this to get their degree will also take shortcuts with my personal health, which is not a comforting thought.

The scenario in the article is very different than a potential doctor being upfront about having implants installed to aid them in their duties.

powersnail• 4 years ago

Because Bluetooth is not superpower; the cheating part is the other end of the communication feeding information to the student. They won't be there when the doctor is treating you.

Real doctors can already use external information anyway. They just use the computer, no need to Bluetooth themselves.

DonHopkins2• 4 years ago

Who doesn't want their own Personal Doctor Feelgood, who prescribes as much Adderall as you can Snort, lets you Dictate Glowing Health Letters, refers you to a Bone Spur Specialist who gets you out of Being Drafted, shoots you up with Penicillin whenever it Hurts When You Pee, then awards you a Purple Heart for getting wounded by Vagina Landmines in your Own Personal Viet Nam?

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/05/01/politics/harold-bornstein...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/politics/trump-vietnam...

https://people.com/politics/trump-boasted-of-avoiding-stds-w...

kevinstubbs• 4 years ago

Well if you read the article...

  “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed. Such a technique was used by a Vyapam scam accused too to clear his medical exam eight years ago.”

And the article also mentions that the Indian Supreme Court themselves cancelled the licenses for 634 doctors licenses issued between 2008 - 2013.. some of which used this same technique.

How it works, where does it go; I have no idea. But clearly it's not a one-off case.

P.S. I think that it's perhaps surgically clipped deep in the inner ear somehow, and not inserted beneath the skin.

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

Well if you read the article...

I did, but how does this:

“It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed.

…answer the question at all? I’m asking about the “attached to the ear” part and the surgical implant the article talks about without a single detail.

Surely if it’s both easy and common then someone should be able to find a picture of the device or the process.

sizzle• 4 years ago

Why not place it into the empty space before your ear drum?

pkrotich• 4 years ago

I'm skeptical as well... someone saw SpongeBob driving test cheating episode [0] and decided to write an article.

[0] https://youtu.be/Zr7EodmMbmo

tomc1985• 4 years ago

Maybe the earpiece transmits sound conductively? When I go to the ENT's office, the audiologist does some tests on me with conductive headphones and usually the point of contact is my skull an inch or two from my ear

lordnacho2• 4 years ago

It reads like a cultural tall tale to me.

First, the subject of Indians cheating on exams is something that surfaces in Western news now and again. It's always said that there's these crazy tough exams that determine your life in India. For instance this guy apparently spent 11 years trying to pass. Totally unlikely, who would do that? The point seems to be to underline the importance of exams in India.

Second, the method of cheating is some badly explained but intricate mechanism. Badly explained in that the story is not complete, how exactly is the Bluetooth used? Intricate in that it's some weirdly complicated thing like getting an operation to have this implanted. It's always something that sounds way too complex to be worthwhile.

Third, the authority in charge of catching the cheaters seems oddly well appointed. Would you really send a special squad to check these kinds of things? Sure, check for hidden notes and phones. You really gonna check for Bluetooth? I mean maybe but I doubt it. How could the guy have a crazy special plan for implanting the thing in his ear but not have anything other than an ordinary plan for smuggling in the phone?

To me it reads like that story of a religious couple that don't know how babies are made. Comes about now and again, makes us chuckle, says something recognisable about society, but ultimately sounds not quite true.

quenix• 4 years ago

To me it reads like that story of a religious couple that don't know how babies are made.

Which story are you referring to?

throwaway815236• 4 years ago

You really gonna check for Bluetooth?

Why not? The check is to wave a metal detector near the person's ear. The main perplexing part to me is the surgery.

lhorie4• 4 years ago

I'm not from India, but the country where I'm from also has universities with highly competitive admission exams. The "crazy tough exams that determine your life" thing is a very specific form of tunnel vision that does actually happen in some upper middle class families. The context is that in the elite schools, admissions are entirely about stack ranking in the entrance exam. You can't "buy" your way into an elite school by showing off extensive extracurricular achievements like you can do for an American Ivy League.

So STEM admissions at elite schools (especially medicine and engineering) are indeed very competitive and there are upper middle class families who do think that nothing short of entering these schools is good enough. While 11 years is pretty hardcore, trying for 2, 3 or even 4 years is not uncommon at all. One of my cousins tried for medicine for such schools several times. People that fail admission exams will often not settle for safety schools; these are considered completely worthless in the eyes of someone aiming for elite schools. Instead, they enroll in cram schools to try again the following year. This is pretty normalized, it's even expected that you'd do that after your first fail.

The exact method of cheating doesn't really matter. All you need to know is that cheating using electronics does happen and has happened since forever. It was already a thing twenty years ago when I was going through admission exams. Schools have always had measures against cheating. In my country in the 90s, they were pretty low tech (e.g. enforcing no cell phones), but I hear some places in China now have some seriously over-the-top anti-cheating mechanisms like signal jamming.

dylan604• 4 years ago

For instance this guy apparently spent 11 years trying to pass.

Isn't this essentially what everyone does? We all go to school from grade school to high school (or their locally named equivalents) for about 11 years before our senior/graduation year. All 11 of those years are meant to be building you up to be able to pass those college entrance tests.

danmur• 4 years ago

Closest thing I could find to a plausible explanation was this (not about implants but about hiding bluetooth devices):

"The chappal is such it has an entire phone inside and a Bluetooth device. The candidate had a device inside his ear and someone from outside the exam hall was helping him cheat," police officer additional SP Ratan Lal Bhargav of the Rajasthan police .

But yeah searching for info about this stuff feels like probing an area of a video game where the developers didn't put much content, just many duplicates of the same article on different sites, all from around Feb 22.

pkphilip• 4 years ago

This is the actual article from an Indian newspaper with photos.

https://www.ptcnews.tv/mp-student-uses-surgically-fitted-blu...

These exams are quite difficult to clear because of the sheer number of people who are applying for the small number of seats. And yes, there are actual "flying squads" of people who go to the examination centres to check for all sorts of innovative ways of cheating

brailsafe• 4 years ago

I'd have to agree. I know enough people with super gauged ears, that the most efficient way to accomplish this would be in plain sight

lhorie4• 4 years ago

"Surgical" doesn't necessarily mean invasive. It's most likely a procedure similar to rhinestone implants[0].

As for why they use a 1-way device: this method of cheating has been around for decades; you get someone to take the test, they leave early and radio answers in. I don't know the specifics for this particular exam, but India is certainly not the only place in the world w/ extremely competitive admission exams. Back in my days back home some twenty years ago, cram schools would be on stand-by outside school doors, they'd smuggle the question sheet out somehow and flash-solve them / publish answers on the spot for publicity. You could get a full answer sheet online from a cram school website before the exam was over (these exams are hours long) and test takers would frequently do so after finishing their exams to see how they did.

[0] https://www.bodycandy.com/blogs/news/microdermal-implants-bo...

throwaway815236• 4 years ago

You could get a full answer sheet online from a cram school website before the exam was over (these exams are hours long)

I'm chuckling imagining the 6 hour Putnam exam getting flash solved like that.

mjbeswick• 4 years ago

Most of the commenters clearly haven't heard of induction headsets!

In that case the implanted "device" would be a small magnet just inserted into the ear canal, while the bluetooth device is just an induction loop.

https://www.ec21.com/product-details/China-Topro-GSM-Inducti...

llampx• 4 years ago

If the teachers are so good at these exams that they can flash-solve them, why aren't they doctors? Surely that pays better than teaching at a cram school?

WheelsAtLarge• 4 years ago

"What use is a 1-way communication device?"

Bluetooth can be 2 ways. But can the implanted device transmit far enough to be picked up by another device or to pick up the sound you are trying to send? Maybe...

As far as how to work it, many of these exams are standardized with a set number of questions. Let's say there are 1000 questions all together and you get tested on 100 of the 1000. You can work out a system where you can get the answers with minimum transmission to your confederate.

It's a lot of work. It seems easier to just study.

One of my economics teacher used to let us fill an index card with information for our exams. We could handwrite as much as we wanted and look at it as much as we needed. So every exam everyone had their card at hand. We would all brag about how small we were able to write. We had to do so much reading and writing to fill up the card that a lot of it stuck in our brain and we hardly needed it. It turned out to be the way he got his students to study. Pretty smart...

brandall10• 4 years ago

Interesting RE: index card, I had a teacher that allowed us to do the exact same thing. It was hilarious how much students were able to cram.

bb882• 4 years ago

Implants have been done before.

From 2013:

https://www.cnet.com/culture/surgically-implanted-headphones...

It's worth noting I've worn a tragus vibrating headphone before, and it works rather well.

hluska• 4 years ago

I noticed on a second read, that the article jumps between one student and two students. It would be tough to go through fact checking and editing and for that confusion to remain. Anyways, I think you nailed it - I don’t trust the article.

differentView• 4 years ago

Pointing out the flaws of a failed cheating method (he was caught) by a cheater who likely have tried other failed cheating methods ("It was the student’s final attempt on Monday to clear the exam after repeatedly failing it since getting admission into the college 11 years ago.") doesn't prove the cheating didn't happen.

He just appears to be both an incompetent medical student and an incompetent cheater.

michaelt• 4 years ago

I don't think that PragmaticPulp doubts that cheating happens. But "student tries to cheat on important exam" is barely local news, let alone global technology news.

The thing that got this to the front page of HN is the specific claim of a surgically implanted bluetooth earpiece. That is what PragmaticPulp is doubtful of.

Of course, if the claim was merely that the student was wearing a very small earpiece, such as [1], and that when told to hand it over he claimed it couldn't safely be removed? That would be much more plausible.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/COOMAX-Invisible-Earpiece-Wireless-...

rambojazz• 4 years ago

This to me is a typical case of POGTFO

mmmmkay• 4 years ago

at that point, just give them the A ;)

eligro912• 4 years ago

I'm having cochlear implant and I'm able to hear sounds using a neckloop same as displayed in this video https://youtu.be/Gu2C6frbW18?t=130

So basically I'm able to control my processor and during boring meetings or family events, I can switch to T mode and listen to music / podcasts, without anyone noticing that. I can even having it balanced.. 50%/50% , or 80% / 20% etc..

I'm sure that it would be so useful in cheating in exams.. hard to identify.. you have aid hearing, they never expect you will cheat with that.

I'm wondering what will happen if Deaf people will be caught doing that? they won't be allowed to hear at all during exams?

mattbrewsbytes• 4 years ago

Can a deaf person be a surgeon if their mode of communicating is with their hands?

That sounds cool to be able to tune out of boring meetings easily. I imagine the number of podcasts you can listen to is more than most people, any favorites related to software?

eligro912• 4 years ago

talk python to me, the rabbit hole. there are more but those are good ones

deutschew• 4 years ago

this will become really popular in Korea

ChuckMcM• 4 years ago

This is so sad. 11 years? You have have read, and re-read, every textbook for your classes like 4 times over in that period of time. It always astonishes me to see someone invest so much time in cheating, when it would take the same or less time to just do the damn work. What is worse, what happens when they have a patient and they don't know what to do because they cheated on that part of the exam? Let them die or become disabled? So very very sad.

Gatsky2• 4 years ago

It’s a phenomenon in medical school. Some people just can’t get through the exams. You can’t just read the textbooks, it isn’t that easy. And anyway, the volume of facts is enormous..

It happens because people aren’t coached or mentored at all, and are too ashamed to ask for help. With proper guidance and encouragement, and hard work, anyone can pass.

Poor patient outcomes aren’t strongly linked to poor learning of exam material. It is true that the sort of person who doesn’t take care to do well on exams also may not take care of patients. This isn’t because they don’t learn the material, it is because they aren’t the sort of person who can commit to being good at medicine (for which there may be valid reasons).

no_time• 4 years ago

It always astonishes me to see someone invest so much time in cheating, when it would take the same or less time to just do the damn work.

There is another factor people tend to forget: cheating is exciting and almost fun in a way.

Reading a book for hours with no end in sight? Boring. Learning morse code and making a little radio equipped foot pedal? Now that's something I'd do in my free time.

During covid I wrote a plugin that hooked into the proctoring site, undid the randomization on the ordering of the multiple choice questions and put a little dot for every answer by another user of my plugin taking the tests. This was to alliviate the chaos of 10 people talking over eachother in a teamspeak, asking for the parts they don't know. It was infinitely more rewarding than learning about graph theory.

codezero• 4 years ago

You can bite on a bone conducting Bluetooth headphone and hear reliably. This was just a dumb move.

caycep• 4 years ago

I think he may be a lousy doctor, but perhaps IT/engineering is his true calling....

whoomp123422• 4 years ago

yeah let me just lance myself right before a test and no one is going to notice my giant fucking stitch

megous• 4 years ago

I don't care about the ear guy, but how are people scaling the building not being noticed? Wtf? :D So bizarre.

textcortex• 4 years ago

Just give the guy the Diploma, he deserved it :)

doctor_eval• 4 years ago

I’m always amazed at the amount of trouble people will go to in order to build their lives on a foundation of lies. I know there are many reasons and pressures, but what a way to start your career. If you’re successful, you’re almost guaranteeing a life of stress - and that’s assuming you don’t kill anyone.

verisimi• 4 years ago

Bring on the neural lace!

thraway3837• 4 years ago

Must be from a wealthy family to afford medical school for 11 years. What kind of lie do you even tell the person who writes the checks? And wouldn't be it awkward AF to be 11 years older than everyone around you when students are 17-21? Even more embarrassing to have every staff and professor know you for this.

The whole university and community knows, what are you really benefiting by keeping their name private. Publicize their face and name. Plaster it on every news site. Nobody wants a doctor who cheated in medical school. Also surprising because universities have dual tracks for graduating that most people don't know about. If you are wealthy or well connected, you get to graduate regardless of academic performance. Some professors also get kickbacks, threats, stopped favors if students aren't allowed to graduate. Perhaps the current administration of the school is not politically or power aligned with this student's connections?

Brybry• 4 years ago

If it's an exam for an MD in General Medicine then most people are probably at least 25 because it looks like in India you need a MBBS (5.5 year undergraduate program) and then the MD program is another 3 years.[1][2]

In the states it takes a long time too: 4+ year undergraduate, 4 year med school, 3-4+ years residency. My sister was around 27 to 28 when she graduated medical school, before even starting her four year residency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Medicine,_Bachelor... [2] https://www.shiksha.com/college/mahatma-gandhi-memorial-medi...

MichaelRazum• 4 years ago

Oh boy. There are obvious better ways...

snambi• 4 years ago

It is published from UK. Probably a fake news story.

mcqueenjordan• 4 years ago

Totally anecdotal, but... I think there's a good amount of cheating in medical school.

I've been personally approached by an acquaintance to assist them in cheating on an oral exam in the final stages of medical school. I obviously refused. I /really/ don't think I put off the vibe of someone who would be OK with cheating, so the fact that even I got wind of plan to cheat leads me to believe it could be fairly prevalent.

Gatsky2• 4 years ago

I never saw any cheating. But it wasn’t a very competitive environment when I think about it.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

I hear they have metal detectors at the entrances of many American schools, and now I see images of a future in which you have to step through an x-ray machine or have a body cavity search before attending an exam.

somid3• 4 years ago

Maybe the student should have been an engineer?

bb882• 4 years ago

So implanted headphones appear to be nothing new (and haven't been for nearly 10 years), and being where they are located in this article makes a lot of sense.

https://www.cnet.com/culture/surgically-implanted-headphones...

The effect would make it completely concealable.

Also it's worth noting that where the implants are completely make sense. I once wore a set of headphones that just vibrated the tragus, and was lightweight and allowed me to hear what else was going on.

Apparently the occulus uses this in the same capability.

https://patent.nweon.com/7181

benasher44• 4 years ago

Sharktank S1E1 realized years later (https://sharktanktales.com/ionic-ear-shark-tank-update/)

cat_plus_plus• 4 years ago

If he/she performed a surgery on a hard to reach area of themselves and there were no complications, maybe let them pass, it's kind of impressive?

raghava• 4 years ago

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/mp-student-gets-bl...

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"A member of the team, Dr Vivek Sathe, frisked the student and found a mobile phone in the inner pocket of his trouser. The phone was switched on and connected to a Bluetooth device, Dr Dixit said. However, the team did not find a Bluetooth device on the student.

On sustained questioning, the student confessed that an ENT surgeon had fitted a skin coloured micro Bluetooth device in his ear.

The squad also found another student with a small SIM-powered device and a micro Bluetooth device, but the student informed the squad that it was not inserted surgically and can be removed with a pin.

The devices have been sent to an internal examination committee, which will decide whether a police case for using unfair means in an exam should be filed, Thakur said.

Dr Anand Rai, the whistleblower in the so-called Vyapam scam, where various competitive exams were rigged, said: “It is very easy to get Bluetooth fitted in the ears. It is attached to the ear temporarily and can be removed. Such a technique was used by a Vyapam scam accused too to clear his medical exam eight years ago.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Many here take that high-risk path, even though they know that clearing the entrance is just step 0, and there are tougher exams further. Such is the mindlessness at display.

qwerty456127• 4 years ago

Everything about the ways we measure people's skills is wrong.

DeathArrow2• 4 years ago

There's no need for surgery since there are bluetooth pieces so small that can't be seen after plugged in the ear.

https://www.spionshop.ro/image/106992.jpg

ca98am79• 4 years ago

Imagine the implications to tournament chess

Medical student surgically implants Bluetooth into own ear to cheat in final

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