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.
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.
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.
I went to a state school in a country where the only way in to university is by taking a test (this was in the early 00's), so I went to one of these cram schools after I finished high school. The cram school was focused on students of lower income families who would otherwise not have the means to attend a more prestigious one, and I remember in the inauguration ceremony for my year's class, one of their former students was invited to give a speech.
Her story was that after four years trying to get into medical school (i.e. four years attending the same cram school), she was given a tuition scholarship to a more prestigious cram school for her fifth year, and then she finally passed the test.
The thing is, this wasn't even an elite school -- it was just the only federal (state-funded) medical school in our state. The fact that the students' only way in was by taking the exam -- extracurriculars were not taken into account there also -- only made it even more of an _achievement_ for you to actually get in, especially if you were not from an upper middle class family.
IMHO the solution is probably to de-emphasize the metric. Class bottlenecks are probably bad. They’ll always happen, but it shouldn’t be the only route to a good life.
My country was like that: solely focusing on one entrance exam to determine your life.
Finally education reform happened and extensive extracurricular achievements are now taken into consideration.
Now those extracurricular achievements are thoroughly gamed. Helping in homeless kitchen, beach cleanup, book club president, awards at science fair, whatever, you name it, everyone is doing everything now. (mostly richer kids have more help though)
So the kids after reform nowadays, they not only have to prepare for a huge exam, but also find time to do all those extensive activities. Some would even miss the old days where they only have to carefully prep for one exam.
> Now those extracurricular achievements are thoroughly gamed. [...] (mostly richer kids have more help though)
It’s to be expected.
Any metric can and will be gamed. An acquaintance who teaches biology (lot of rote) told me how grades skyrocketed in his classroom after they switched to online classes. He attributed it to students (a lot of them foreign from China and India) being more comfortable asking questions via email instead of in-classroom due to English being their second (or third!) language. I had a different theory.
I’m not surprised most extracurriculars will be created in order to game the system (ever seen a club where all members are presidents?). At least, maybe the kids will do something else (that they are interested in) for a few hours a week instead of spending those cramming to get fraction of points improvement on testing. I recall someone from such country telling me people told him it was a waste of time learning to program (!!) since that wouldn’t help him answer exam questions a little bit faster than his peers. He, at the time, was envious of US kids that could spend time doing robotics or CS and have it count toward something for college admission.
Yeah, I do see the appeal of variety. It was a breath of fresh air that finally those kids would have some room to do something else.
Just wanna share a ridiculous scene I saw on the street:
A high school kid with his father at a bus stop. The kid got a window wiper and the dad had a bucket filled with water. I overheard that the kid needed to include more activities on his college application, the dad was dead set on making up this fake community service of washing bus stops. The kid was just going along with this. The dad all of a sudden splashed the water onto a pane of glass at the bus stop and asked his kid to hurry up and take the window wiper to pose for a picture. They snapped pictures from several angles and just bounced! That pane of glass was not even cleaned, only it now confusingly sported a splash of water. My face was laughing so hard in my palm.
Sure, the underlying point that exams are really important is true. And it's also true that people try to cheat, and that people retry the same exam several times.
What makes it a tall tale is the over-the-topness of it.
>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.
I'm from Eastern Europe and I did have to pass tough admission exams to enroll in CS and Math program in University. Medicine and Law School admissions were even tougher.
Things are much more relaxed today, to the point that for some specialties there are no admission exams.
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
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.
A legend referenced in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 1961;
(Doc Daneeka) 'Like that virgin I'm telling you about that couldn't have a baby.'
'What virgin?' Yossarian asked. 'I thought you were telling me about some newlyweds.'
'That's the virgin I'm telling you about. They were just a couple of young kids, and they'd been married, oh, a little over a year when they came walking into my office without an appointment. You should have seen her. She was so sweet and young and pretty. She even blushed when I asked about her periods. I don't think I'll ever stop loving that girl. She was built like a dream and wore a chain around her neck with a medal of Saint Anthony hanging down inside the most beautiful bosom I never saw. "It must be a terrible temptation for Saint Anthony," I joked--just to put her at ease, you know. "Saint Anthony?" her husband said. "Who's Saint Anthony?" "Ask your wife," I told him. "She can tell you who Saint Anthony is." "Who is Saint Anthony?" he asked her. "Who?" she wanted to know. "Saint Anthony," he told her. "Saint Anthony?" she said. "Who's Saint Anthony?" When I got a good look at her inside my examination room I found she was still a virgin. I spoke to her husband alone while she was pulling her girdle back on and hooking it onto her stockings. "Every night," he boasted. A real wise guy, you know. "I never miss a night," he boasted. He meant it, too. "I even been puttin' it to her mornings before the breakfasts she makes me before we go to work," he boasted. There was only one explanation. When I had them both together again I gave them a demonstration of intercourse with the rubber models I've got in my office. I've got these rubber models in my office with all the reproductive organs of both sexes that I keep locked up in separate cabinets to avoid a scandal. I mean I used to have them. I don't have anything any more, not even a practice. The only thing I have now is this low temperature that I'm really starting to worry about. Those two kids I've got working for me in the medical tent aren't worth a damn as diagnosticians. All they know how to do is complain. They think they've got troubles? What about me? They should have been in my office that day with those two newlyweds looking at me as though I were telling them something nobody'd ever heard of before. You never saw anybody so interested. "You mean like this?" he asked me, and worked the models for himself awhile. You know, I can see where a certain type of person might get a big kick out of doing just that. "That's it," I told him. "Now, you go home and try it my way for a few months and see what happens. Okay?" "Okay," they said, and paid me in cash without any argument. "Have a good time," I told them, and they thanked me and walked out together. He had his arm around her waist as though he couldn't wait to get her home and put it to her again. A few days later he came back all by himself and told my nurse he had to see me right away. As soon as we were alone, he punched me in the nose.'
'He did what?'
'He called me a wise guy and punched me in the nose. "What are you, a wise guy?" he said, and knocked me flat on my ass. Pow! Just like that. I'm not kidding.'
'I know you're not kidding,' Yossarian said. 'But why did he do it?'
'How should I know why he did it?' Doc Daneeka retorted with annoyance.
'Maybe it had something to do with Saint Anthony?' Doc Daneeka looked at Yossarian blankly. 'Saint Anthony?' he asked with astonishment. 'Who's Saint Anthony?'
>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.
> 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
Strongly implies it was 11 years in the same college.
I'm just thinking if you spent 11 years and still haven't graduated, maybe it's not for you. If you can't pass the exam, you don't know the material, and you probably shouldn't pursue this career.
“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.
"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.
My understanding is it was an all-hands-on-deck, divide-and-conquer thing. The big brand cram schools had literally hundreds of teachers whose only jobs was preparing students for admission exams. They could easily have each question solved by 5 different teachers in parallel.
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?
Teachers typically specialize in a single subject and tests are multi-disciplinary. The subjects can range from literature to chemistry to history to physics. As in, you have to be at the top of the pack for literature questions even if you're applying for engineering. And recall, these are no pushover questions; I've taken some of these elite school exams as well as the american SAT/SAT 2 and the SATs are child's play in comparison.
Also, competitiveness for some disciplines is seriously no joke: to give you an idea, medicine at Harvard has an admission rate of around 3.5%. Medicine at University of Sao Paulo, Brazil has an admission rate of 0.8%. Admission rates for IIT, India are even worse, at around 0.59%.
And if that isn't discouraging enough, many of these schools have reputations of being "hard to get in, harder to get out" (meaning that actually graduating is ever harder than getting accepted into the program in the first place)
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...
There was a kid at my school who wrote on both sides, on top of eachother with both red and blue pens. He then brought in red/blue 3d glasses, and would close one eye to filter out red/blue and read the notes.
I had an elective class that was open notes/book so I collected all the notes and resources the professor provided, put them into a single PDF, and then just text-searched them in the class. Worked well but the class was a joke and it didn't matter if I left knowing any of the material. Just had to check the box.
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.
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.
It was done regularly in my highschool in the 2000s, there'd be two or three versions of the test and they'd be distributed randomly. We'd know which one we got because of a label in the corner, which was also how they used the right key for grading.
It'd surprise me if such a simple mitigation wasn't done for more important exams...
Medical licensing exams in the US are randomized within the same sitting, even having two examiners in the same room receiving entirely different questions (not just random question ordering).
I've had plenty of professional and academic exams with multiple different versions of the exam with the questions scrambled. I think almost all of my Bachelor level science courses were provided in that way, as well as multiple Bar exams.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
You're making generalizations based on proxy information, which is basically the same thing that a test does you're just using a different set of information to key off of.
Not that there isn't some signal in the pile of noise that you're picking through but a willingness to circumvent academic requirements isn't exactly a strong indicator of performance in the field. Competent professionals fudge requirements they consider to be irrelevant all the time (inb4 no true Scotsman).
> Competent professionals fudge requirements they consider to be irrelevant all the time (inb4 no true Scotsman).
That's because they know more than the people who wrote the requirements, because the requirements were written 15 years ago when the medical profession as a whole knew a lot less about $INSERT_CONDITION_HERE.
You'll also notice that those requirements are explicitly written to permit fudging. “Two or more of the below”, “most of these”, “one or more”, “or other reason” etc..
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.
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?
For instance, as a counter example, if you wired your brain up to a hard drive loaded with an immense amount of medical data that you'd be able to access at will for the rest of your life (instead of learning most of that rote knowledge through traditional sources) I wouldn't consider that cheating. Assuming you're still sufficiently good at critical thinking and problem solving then I wouldn't really have any objection to a doctor who keeps his knowledge of the krebs cycle on an instantly accessible external storage device.
I would expect some of this exam is not about rote information but requires actual problem solving. E.g.: patient has XYZ symptoms, what is your diagnosis?
By analogy, bringing all the printed books or hard drives you want into a chess match might help you with the opening, but not the rest of the game. These days there are chess engines, but before that, cheating required a human accomplice who was a good player, who knew what was on your board and could tell you the right move. My old club had an incident of a guy doing that using hand signals.
Now they won't let you bring any devices at all into chess tournaments, even mechanical wristwatches. A pity. Garry Kasparov famously used to fidget with his watch while playing. You could tell how good his game was by noticing whether the watch was on his wrist or on the table.
Treating any sort of complex medical condition requires a physician to actually understand the biochemistry, including interactions between multiple pathways. Having ready access to reference sources isn't sufficient. This is why medical schools involve a lot more than rote memorization.
So if your doctor spent sufficient time studying those complex interactions and didn't waste time on the rote memorization - would you consider them ill-equipped? If this student's learning could be more focused on the problem solving side of things would you think they'd make a worse doctor?
A competent physician needs to spend sufficient time on rote memorization and then use that as a foundation to understand complex interactions. This is why medical school and residency takes so long. There are no good shortcuts.
This is an apples to oranges comparison of course - but good developers spend time in university learning a whole bunch of theory and problem solving and almost nothing on rote learning (outside of how to find information which is a skill - while the information you're finding isn't one).
Perhaps the medical field is radically different - but I'd wager there's a whole lot of benefit that's been delivered to healthcare by giving doctors access to the internet so they don't need to focus so much of their time on trying to recall vague facts from twenty years prior in school and residencies.
Many specialties in the medical field are radically different. Physicians simply don't have time to look things up during a typical 10 minute outpatient encounter, or in the middle of a surgical procedure. The time pressure is just way more intense than what most developers ever deal with.
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?
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.