China's New Anti-Cheating Strategy: Cheating May Kill You!

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the you'll-poke-your-eye-out! dept

Earlier this month, China announced it was going to scramble mobile phone signals around the testing centers where the big annual college exams are held. However, it appears that plenty of kids only took that to be a challenge, rather than an obstacle, and put together all sorts of sneaky new cheating devices. Of course, reading through the different devices that kids were caught with makes you wonder if, perhaps, the students’ time might have been better spent, you know, studying for the exam. Also, you have to wonder how accurate the article is, since every case of caught cheaters mentions how the cheating devices injured the student. There’s the “microearphone” that perforated the ear drum, another microearphone that got stuck and needed surgery to remove and (my personal favorite) the “interphone hidden in a student’s abdomen [that] caused bleeding when it exploded.” I’m not quite sure what an interphone is, or why you would hide one in your abdomen (or, frankly, how it would explode — perhaps the exams were taken near the Great Wall), but it’s not clear the Chinese authorities actually care about reality here. They’re just trying to scare kids away from cheating.