Cheating gets smarter with smartphones

Sanjay Dutt as Munna bhai emerging as the topper in his exams by plugging onto earphones and scribbling answers is a thing of the past. With even teachers having watched the movie, students have now resorted to new techniques to cheat lecturers and complete exams successfully.

There was also a time in the past (about 30 years ago), when students in engineering colleges would carry small chits of papers with answers written in them. They would roll up these chits in the sleeves of their shirts or even shove it into their socks. They would pull it out and copy the answers. Very ingenious was what was said about such copying methods those days.

With technology improving at a rapid pace, lecturers are having to deal with students adopting new measures. The new technique of copying now involves use of smartphones, which provide a wide screen and an extensive memory. Adding to these features are options such as browsing through the internet, downloading PDFs, documents and images.

Armed with the smartphone, students download test material onto their mobile phone and take it into the test centres. Once, inside the exam hall, the sleek phones with the test material are opened and the zoom option is used to blow up the text.

With smartphone technology providing high quality resolution of the text, copying from the phone can be done easily as it can be hid under a bench or desk and students can scribble their answers with minimum effort.

Others, who don’t own a smartphone are using their ingenuity to use the cameras affixed with the phone to get the better of exams. They click a part of the text and save it in the phone or data card memory. Once in the exam hall, they open the text stored as a photograph and zoom in to get a clearer view of the answers.

A student at an engineering college in the city on condition of anonymity disclosed that this is practised by a large number of students writing their internal exams. However, he said he was yet to see anybody try out the technique in the final exams! He said the practise wasn’t just limited to engineering colleges, but had been used by students of degree and medical colleges as well.