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Admin
Best feeling keyboard ever. I wish the crappy Sun keyboard I'm typing on at the moment felt half that good. And it's a "Type 6", which is better than most. I hate the spongy feel of most keyboards.
Admin
I agree with you completely. Hacking the software is just another way to get a decent score, and a perfect example of "out-of-the-box" thinking that is so valued.
Admin
Ignoring the blatantly obvious fact that cheating wasn't tolerated, merely built into the system:
Cheating at work involves ... no, I'm not going to mention the BushCheney2000 robot and chads here; that's too obvious.
Cheating at work involves jacking up quarterly profits so that, come the crash, you are actually paid -- hundreds of millions -- to walk away from the car crash because you are too dangerous.
Cheating at work involves marketing a pup like pretty much any version of Oracle prior to 8i as ZeeBeezNeez just because everybody else buys it (which they didn't) and the DoD and CIA are thrilled with it (which they weren't) and it just, y'know, works out of the box (which it didn't). My bias. Substitute EDS, SAP, anything you like, for Oracle.
Cheating at work involves getting somebody fired for sexual harassment (which they didn't do) because you want their job (which you then signally fail, in purely monetary terms, to do). This happened to a Sales Manager friend of mine. He was an Aussie. It's incredibly easy to indict an Aussie on a charge of sexual harassment. A random ten seconds of tape would do it.
Cheating at school is taken rather more seriously. Teachers at any level whatsoever -- and I'm sure there are little compounds in Scarsdale with pre-natal teachers, screaming "Not enough Mozart! You're not ready to be born yet!" -- are Professionals.
Professionals do not abide cheating. Another friend, a University senior lecturer (read "God" for State schools in the USA), literally spent his last year chasing down exam cheats. He only caught three, but he claims it was (a) the most satisfying year of his career in terms of his subject (Mathematics), and (b) most satisfying year of his career in terms of achievement (catching exam cheats).
Well, that's what specialising in numerical analysis does for you, I suppose.
But, hell, we're all Professionals, aren't we?
Admin
thats hilarious, i went to ISU and in my business class we did that same thing, had a lemonade stand and had to divy up advertising/R&D etc etc and did the EXACT same thing you did to your peers. It was essentially a hidden share drive and we would do some corporate espionage on the other teams to analyze their tactics and trump them all. Yes we were CS majors as well.
Admin
It's almost sexual. I mean, what do you get for $80 these days? "Yes, for that, I'll bite your chest hair off -- but first, I have to change golf-balls..."
Oops, sorry. Should have avoided the brown acid.
Admin
Ah, that's better. A good dose of Rumpo always makes your priorities clearer. What was I saying?
Oh yes.
When in doubt, choose C++.
Admin
I had a lazy teacher who printed the same tests on two colors of paper and alternated them when handing them out and collecting them. We discovered this when a fire alarm caused the test to be canceled and we were able to get together outside the building.
Admin
Admin
TRWTF is that the kids were overwriting the answer.key file, when they could've just done "type answer.key" and actually use the correct answers!!!
Admin
@Channel6:
You completed the assignment within the tools common to your chosen discipline. They had marketing and statistics, you had hacking and software engineering.
Seems fair to me.
Admin
As has been pointed out, the kids that find the exploits generally don't need to cheat. They revel in merely having broken the system.
I always made straight A's, but that doesn't mean that when we found vunerabilities that we didn't exploit them.
It's the kids who are making C's and B's that try to cheat, not the kids making A's. The kids making A's find the exploits and the kids making B's and C's use them and get caught.
Admin
Well if that isn't, what is? = ]
Admin
Admin
I've mentioned it here before, but it's worth repeating. My Intro to CS class in college had online tests. These ran in browser and were graded in Javascript. Then the numeric score was posted to the server. I aced a lot of tests.
Admin
The 2000's version of that would be a "Web 2.0" test written in Javascript.
Admin
It's called OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) not OCR.
Admin
This entire story reminded me of this: http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1730017
Admin
Yeah, um, that was a joke.
Admin
9 digit ID number starting in a 203 - was this guy from PA? Also, why was the date marked as 5/01/07, but submitted on Dec 22, 2006?
Admin
Yes, for significantly high values of True.
Admin
Admin
Write 1 batch file to ace every test you take in the future, or study for each and every test.
I know what my lazy ass would have picked.
Admin
@ Channel 6 - Don't feel bad. My class did the same "lemonade stand" program, but it was management vs. marketing. Management played through the legit way. Those of us on the marketing team got a copy of the game CD and brute forced the best set of input data. It took us a few hours and a computer lab. We chalked it up to "outside of the box" thinking.
Admin
Or better yet, learning the SUBJECT.
Admin
1: Question 2: ... 3: Proof!
Admin
Oh, I got in trouble in high school for hacking the library's new computerized card catalog. They spent all summer entering the information, but i noticed that if i pressed control-c to escape the menu, i got dropped to a dos prompt. well, that got me banned from the library. ctrl-c is the enemy...
Admin
My middle school's Mac lab allowed access to HyperCard Player, which made it fairly trivial to close At Ease (which they were using to "lock" down the machine) and open Finder instead. Then you could actually get some work done.
Admin
Admin
This reminds me of a story from college where one professor tried to move to computerized "testing". It was an essay test and he had given us the questions beforehand. We simply divided up the work with each of us answering 2-3 questions and then combined them into on "answers.txt" file. When it was time to take the test we just sat down at any "random" computer in the lab and copied and pasted our answers. It took us about 3 minutes to complete the test.
The bad thing was that some people turned it in after 3 minutes and one girl actually left the instructions ("Don't forget to delete these instructions before you turn in your test.") at the bottom of her answer. I don't think she made it very far in computers.
So, the prof figured out that we were cheating and the next test he placed us at assigned computers so that we didn't know beforehand which computer we would use and therefor couldn't install the answer.txt file like before. The problem (or solution really) was that the computers were networked and I just created a fake answer file (c:\windows\system32\dvi32.dll) and only told the people in our little group.
Silly teacher. We figured that if he didn't really understand computers enough to stop that type of thing then we didn't really feel bad about cheating. Was it wrong? Yes. Did he deserve it? Yes. :)
Admin
You had a sponge? We had to use fingernail clippings held together with dried saliva.
Admin
I get it! Storage devices can virtually store an infinite amount of data, and computers are virtually infinitely fast!
Admin
...this programs sux! a good teaching program can work but a program with all those bugs can't be used!
Admin
They're both references to The Music Man.
Admin
As a programmer and a marketer, while I think your methods were clever, your last sentence was pretty insulting. For some reason programmers believe that marketers are all scum-bags and there are no rules once you are in the game. Yet, I find more often than not, it is the novices who are cheating the system because they just don't know how to win the right way.
Admin
Yeah, I agree my rationalisation was fairly flimsy. I didn't feel particularly good about what we did, but in fairness the system probably should have been locked down a bit better. If we weren't doing it, I'm sure a few of the other CS groups were.
Anyway, it's not just programmers who feel that way about marketers. Try some of Bill Hicks' work for example: http://sennoma.net/main/edits/Hicks.html
Admin
Belief is irrelevant in the face of plain truth. We just call it like we see it.
Admin
Admin
That must be where the candidate from Too Good to be True went to school.
Admin
Nice one, Channel6. Your story is as funny as the article!
Admin
Very witty.
Even pen & paper tests are sometimes made pointless by technology. In grade 11 we we're working on De Bello Gallico and one major test would consist of translating one chapter from Latin. Fortunately the teacher decided to give us a vocabulary list up-front. He wanted us to memorize them, instead of giving them to us during the test...
Needless to say I didn't have to study hard for that one. The computer was quite accurate in predicting the right chapter.
Admin
I was in a class that used the same tactic of different colored, but otherwise identical, tests. It was pretty obvious what was going on when the answers were discussed in class afterward. The sad part was that half the class didn't catch on, even after the TA pretty much told us point blank that the tests were the same.
Admin
Yeah, who could possibly have had that insight besides a TopCod3r!
And an unauthorized "explorer.exe"?
I think we've found the real behavioral problem too.
Admin
Since there is a slick salesman involved in selling things in an educational setting, I'd be willing to bet that River City is a reference to The Music Man.
Admin
I guess what it's called depends on whether it's trying to recognize a mark or a character, doesn't it?
Instead of scanning for filled in ovals, it could have been scanning for alpha answers in the leftmost column or something.
Don't look so smart now, do you?
Admin
I wonder if this company went on to making Electronic Voting Machines?
Admin
No... It's pretty obvious this was a business major. A CS student who cheated the whole way through would have known the stupid tricks and made it slightly secure, as a game if nothing else. That's really what happened here: it was a game.
Due to the game aspect, we discovered the following: Freshman year: You could copy anyone's work, or write to their account. Sophmore year: They figured that one out. You could only copy their work now. Global shares filled with warez. Junior year: I spent class after class searching for a new global-write (last one got nuked). I then wrote a chat program abusing it. And a trojan (never released). Senior year: The one computer class (hardware) didn't have any network connections, but my friend mananged to find the county-wide network, and get global-write.
Admin
You haven't been to high school lately, have you? The people who are trying these tricks are generally the ones who have already read the material, know it back and forwards, and got in trouble for trying to read something else in class while waiting for the slower students to "get it" on the fifteen round of explanations.
Also, I've done similar, to show that yes, the system can be hacked, and maybe that jock doesn't have a 100 wpm typing speed (the test software calculated wpm by number of keystrokes over time, but only checked accuracy at the end. So you could mash the keyboard, backspace, slooowly type the correct text, and score speed points for all those keystrokes.) I posted some >500 wpm by turning the key repeat speed waay up and the delay waay down. Sure, it took me five minutes to finish the exercise, but man did I hit a bunch of keys! Once the teacher saw impossible times, he paid attention (and thus removed the possibility of cheating).
Personally, I've found that tests and knowledge have only a vague correlation. And with the new push for "standardized testing" in my area, it's only going to get worse.
Admin
I once worked for a principle that would buy something like this in a heartbeat. They never seem to do any RESEARCH to see if the system they're spending 20K on is actually going to work.
Admin
I suspect that may well be a WTF all of its own.
Admin
My College Biology prof solved the problem of writing and cheating on tests in a very effective manner. We had tests every two weeks (2 hours long), and every one but the first had exactly one question:
1.) What did you learn the last two weeks?
The "answer" key was a list of topics that had been covered over the last two weeks, and you were graded based on the percentage of those topics you discussed intelligently in your essay. For example, one topic might be mitosis, and an accurate description of mitosis would be what the grader would look for.
Of course, his TAs hated him (at least those that weren't fathering his children) because the grading was extremely difficult, but it did make it more or less useless to try to look at someone else's paper.
On the plus side, that was one of the few classes, even college classes, that I knew the material dead cold.