Are we going to completely ignore the absolute insanity of arresting someone for cheating on an exam.
Turkish middle school, high school, and university exams are very serious.
Basically everyone takes the same set of long exams (with a few additions you can add to your standard exam sets, for specialized schools) and when the results come out, you are compared to all other students in the nation.
Like, think global leaderboards.
The best universities will outright reject you if your ranking isn’t high enough.
It’s very intense and cut-throat; so much so that - when I was a young’un growing up in Turkey - I just opted to try my hand at the SATs instead. Ended up going to school abroad.
The SATs were so easy, compared to the exam prep we did in our Turkish classes, it almost felt like a joke. Though, college tuition costs definitely made sure I wasn’t the one with the last laugh.
Honestly this just makes me think that schools and universities should be shuffling their staff and teachers to keep one or the other school from becoming “the good one” that becomes a magnet for nepo babies and tomorrow’s burnout cases.
That level of direct competition is just gonna lead to people who are NOT able to work cooperatively or really trust anyone.
Plus breaking up the nepo clubs is important for keeping the social ladder at a reasonable angle to climb, college should be everyone’s chance to make important connections, not just for the Ivy League alums’ kids while everyone else gets told it’s about getting the piece of paper and having lots of free pizza while you’re doing it.
The brutal, national, standardized exam is what you get when you eliminate all the other barriers to going to university. It means every single student is in competition with one another to get accepted.
Shuffling staff around between schools just sounds like a great way to drive all the best researchers to the private sector while driving all the best teachers out of the profession entirely. Forcing people to move around to different cities for their job means you are selecting heavily for a particular “nomadic” type of person without any attachments to the local community. Sounds absolutely awful to foist that on educational institutions who really ought to be in the business of fostering community.
I mean that’s easily fixed by just shuffling teachers within commuting range and also only doing the shuffle every 4 years or so for kids to maintain consistency while reaching the stages of development.
Of course there could also be a higher payed tier that can get shuffled further afield for those fresh faced youngin teachers that haven’t settled down yet.
I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.
But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.
The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.
If it’s not universities, they will meet in country clubs and summer parties. No suggestions for how we short-circuit this entire process but something fundamental about how our society works will have to change for all children to have equal or near-equal levels of opportunity
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Seems like a great recipes for more private schools. If a local public school isn’t any better than anyone else’s why would the wealthy send their kids there?
A variation of that is currently each community decides how much to spend on their future. Some people choose to live in communities that spend less, while others move to the best school district they can afford. Why would someone who cares about their kids’ education want anything to do with “mediocre “ schools
Maybe initially but over time forcing the kids to spread out is going to break down those more entrenched dynastic networks, because those kids might just decide to settle down where they end up, meaning their connection to the network is effectively severed unless they eventually decide to go back.
Here’s your proposal in a nutshell. “Can we have the rich and powerful impose laws on the rich and powerful to reduce the benefits that will have for their children?” And even if we could do that, you completely ignore the option of them just hiring tutors to train their kids (which is already done by some).
Not saying your goals are bad, perhaps a little misguided, and rely on the people that would be negatively impacted (by their perception) to make it happen.
I mean stanger things have happened in political history, every amendment to the US constitution that expanded the right to vote was passed by a country of leaders elected before those expanded rights went into effect, meaning the wider voting pool would inherently risk negatively impacting them even insofar as having to spend the time and energy campaigning to the newly enfranchised.
Taking for granted that the rich and powerful can never be made to accept changes wich negatively impact their wealth and power is a dangerous game of giving in to the most advantageous form of cynicism to the rich and powerful, the kind where you stop expecting anything of them and stop pushing for accountability when they fail those expectations.
Estate tax reform and/or UBI
At the same time we’ll ignore that the exam is high-stakes enough to drive people to desperate measures to game it.
The whole process of manufactured selection in a society is dystopian and sociological horror, if ragingly common throughout the industrialized world.
What’s the solution? Gommunism?
Now that you mention it (checking Wikipedia) Turkey is the country for whom Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is president, one of the most notorious autocrats in the world (to whom the former President of the United States is a huge fan and wants to emulate). So yes, a regime change to something way more democratic with proper social safety nets would certainly be helpful.
I can’t speak with regards to other communists, but to this communist, the notion of post-scarcity communism in which everyone is comfortably homed, fed, educated and informed is regarded as a remote ideal that will require addressing bunches of problems to achieve.
That said, Turkey within its own history has done better than it is doing today. I suspect Erdoğan (and the killer test for which it’s a major crime to cheat on) is a symptom rather than a cause.
How about getting more professors on board and making sure everyone can study?
You could hire a hundred times as many grad students into the tenure track but that still wouldn’t stop people from competing to study with the best ones.
Have you attended university?
Yesterday was my convocation day. So yes!
it is a nation wide examination that is why
we are not going to ignore lunatic who thinks cheating is normal. he is perpetrating fraud worth thousands of dollars; first in tuition, then in future earnings.
would you like to be operated on by a surgeon who passed the school thanks to ai? would you like to live on a 20th floor of a building designed by such structural engineer?
Do businesses in Turkey not make sure people can do the job (surgery, building design) and rely on this school testing?
What do you mean by tuition, isn’t that a service already paid for?
Do businesses in Turkey not make sure people can do the job
i would imagine they do and checking that applicant has proper education is probably big part of that 😆
isn’t that a service already paid for
and that’s why it is a fraud, someone (state) pays for your education and you are scamming him.
Coming up with a solution way more complicated than “studying”. Brilliant!
I mean, there are things that you are just more interested in than others.
Tinkering with electronics and coding some kind of “complicated” method of cheating for some people would be way easier than studying, especially if the cheating is through something that already is your hobby.
I can work on my motorcycle and fix various things for hours and not mind a thing, but if you ask me to study a chapter from my production management textbook, I’m going to complain all the way
I definitely have not been ignoring my project and product management LinkedIn Learning courses in favor of Tinkering with mechanical keyboards. Definitely not.
We used to make super realistic looking Coke labels and put all the formulas in tiny print where the ingredients would normally be. Definitely took a lot of work, but it beat studying!
Video of it working:
I’m more interested to know how they got caught. It sounds like they weren’t confident enough to keep their cool.
Wild. Yeah, he was probably squirming more that normal, or the teacher heard the AI voice.
I wonder if the camera needed to be triggered to take the photo. So the student would be leaning over the exam unnaturally, and pressing a button somewhere to capture the photo.
Pretty clever contraption though.
Is there a link to the video that doesn’t give the daily mail a click?
But why AI? Every time i ask deepAI (the one without login) about something you can’t google, it confidently proposes me 3 wrong and one partially right solution. I correct it then and it apologises and proposes me 2 additional wrong solutions.
Edit: ah, for camera deciphering.
One of the top tier models would probably do well on a standardized test like that. You don’t get them for free, though.
You can try some different chat models free at DDG. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=DuckDuckGo&ia=chat
As soon as I read about the shoe cell modem, I thought Eudaemons. It’s rad Ars called that out too!
Largely a myth though, since it was never used beyond practice. People tell stories about it being used in casinos and the tale has become larger than life
I think people conflate it with the MIT blackjack team
It was used for about $10K US (a little over $48K today) worth of takings before they stopped because one of their wearable computers was burning the wearer.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Saturday, Turkish police arrested and detained a university student who is accused of developing an elaborate scheme to use AI and hidden devices to help him cheat on an exam, reports Reuters and The Daily Mail.
According to police reports, the student used a camera disguised as a shirt button, connected to AI software via a “router” (possibly a mistranslation of a cellular modem) hidden in the sole of their shoe.
The system worked by scanning the exam questions using the button camera, which then relayed the information to an unnamed AI model.
The police discovered a mobile phone that could allegedly relay spoken sounds to the other person, allowing for two-way communication.
The Eudaemons were a group of physics graduate students from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who developed a wearable computer device designed to predict the outcome of roulette spins in casinos.
While the Eudaemons’ plan didn’t involve a university exam, it shows that the urge to call upon remote computational powers greater than oneself is apparently timeless.
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Momma says AI is THA DEVUL
