Posts tagged Cheating at Switched

Posts with tag cheating

Online Poker Cheating Costly, Unpoliceable

by Lee Bains, posted Dec 1st 2008 at 2:00PM

Over the past two years, the largely unregulated business of online poker has seen two major cheating scandals, according to a joint report by '60 Minutes' and the Washington Post.

Players on the poker site Absolute Poker uncovered the first of the two scandals in August of 2007, when one apparently novice player, known as "Grey Cat," began consistently winning high-stakes games. After pressing the site administrators for information, the amateur investigators finally discovered that the too-lucky player was, in fact, a former employee of the Web site who had cracked Absolute Poker's software code. Although administrators conceded this fact, and instituted $1.6 million worth of refunds to its players, they refused to make public the cheater's identity.

Continue reading Online Poker Cheating Costly, Unpoliceable

Kids Share Tips for Cheating in School on YouTube

by Lee Bains, posted Nov 23rd 2008 at 12:10PM

Videos instructing students in how to effectively cheat are increasingly prevalent on YouTube, according to CBS News.

While YouTube has not exercised its authority to remove these videos, or at least any significant portion of them, commentators are urging kids to consider their future reputations, and that apparently antiquated notion of ethics, before posting such videos.

Some kids, while using pseudonyms, nevertheless display their faces in the videos, while the craftier among them are careful to more fully obscure their identities. The highlighted methods of sneaking notes into a classroom range from sewing them into articles of clothing, to creating an impostor soft drink label with photo-editing software.

With all the creativity and time these kids expend in devising these methods, implementing them and editing videos on how to do it, couldn't they just be studying? [From: CBS News]

School Lets Students 'Phone a Friend' on Exams

by Tim Stevens, posted Aug 20th 2008 at 5:52PM

As the Internet becomes increasingly important in our day-to-day lives, some are getting worried that it's making us, well, stupid to put it bluntly. The fear is that, with access to the world's knowledge instantly available at our fingertips, we're not learning as much as we should, becoming co-dependent on technology to remember things. Some aren't so worried, though, seeing this as inevitable and ultimately for the greater good. Administrators of a private school near Sydney, Australia definitely fall into that latter group, and they now allowing students in some tests to use their cell phones to call friends for help and look up answers on the Internet.

The school is the Presbyterian Ladies' College at Croydon and it is encouraging its students to use all the resources they have available to them in the same way that they will later in life:

In their working lives they will never need to carry enormous amounts of information around in their heads. What they will need to do is access information from all their sources quickly and they will need to check the reliability of their information.

They are required to cite all their sources when relying on extra-curricular avenues of information retrieval, so they can't just pull any information they like. Their answers still need to be right to pass, after all. [From: textually.org]

Hidden Earpiece Gets 8-Year-Old Booted From Tennis Tourney

by Will Safer, posted Jul 24th 2008 at 4:01PM

An 8-year-old tennis player in New Zealand was recently booted out of a tournament for wearing a hidden earpiece, which her father rigged under her shirt and headband to help her keep track of the scores.

The idea of the clandestine earpiece reached a popular zenith when President George W. Bush was thought to have used one to help along his answers during a debate with Democratic candidate John Kerry and during interviews during the 2004 election campaign. Now, it seems, the kids are getting in on the act.

In the under-10 girls tournament of the Canterbury Junior Winter Tournament in New Zealand, players are required to keep track of their own scores and calls. Young Anastasiya Korzh, participating in her first competition, was having trouble focusing on her game and keeping the score in her head.

Her dad Demetr (also her coach) wired up his frustrated daughter on the third day of the tournament. He maintains that there was no cheating in mind, and that the earpiece was merely for helping her keep score.

Officials noticed the earpiece and disqualified Korzh from the tournament. [Source: The Telegraph.]

Man Tries to Ditch Cheating Wife on eBay

by Terrence O'Brien, posted May 15th 2008 at 4:37PM

The Internet has provided many ways for shaming those who have wronged you, and we thought we'd seen them all. That is, until Paul Osborn decided to auction off his "adulterous, lying, cheating, bitch, whore" of a wife on eBay (his words).

Paul found out that his wife and mother of his children, Sharon, was having an affair with a co-worker. His response was to throw her out of the house and post an "auction" for her on eBay. We use quotes around "auction" because in the listing Paul specifically states, "please do not bid on her because she is worth sod all." Paul also used the eBay listing to out her lover Richard Drew, who is also married. Paul provided phone numbers and addresses for both Richard and Sharon. Naturally, eBay took the listing down pretty quickly. [Source: The Sun]

Writer Confesses To Cheating at Online Scrabble

by Terrence O'Brien, posted Dec 26th 2007 at 4:06PM

Nothing sucks the fun out of a game of wits like cheating. And when playing games online, cheating is so easy it's hard not to do, as one Wired writer found out when she added the Scrabulous application to her Facebook page. Scrabulous allows members to play a Scrabble-like game (Scrabble is a copyright of Parker Brothers) with their Facebook friends.

Sarah Fallon (the writer in question) became addicted to a little online app called Scrabble Word Finder which searches through the letters in your hand for words you can form, revealing those obscure high-point, seven-letter bingo phrases that humiliate an opponent.

But in the end, our online Scrabble cheat saw the error of her ways and cast off her nasty habit. She even noted that Scrabble Word Finder did have some shortcomings, ignoring simple elegant plays like tacking an 'S' on to the intersection of 'quill' and 'combo' for quite respectable 27 points.

Playing games online allows people from all over the country and world to connect and compete. But remember, despite our cultural differences, one thing remains the same, nobody likes a cheat.

From Wired

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Penn State Summons Big Brother to Stop Cheating

by Tim Stevens, posted Oct 10th 2007 at 2:34PM

In George Orwell's '1984,' the people were kept in check by the fear that Big Brother might be watching. At a new testing center at Pennsylvania State University, students won't have to wonder if they're being watched; they'll know.

The new test hall, which opens next spring, is basically a big, high-security room full of cubicles and cameras. Professors schedule exams and when students show up to take them there, they must swipe their ID cards for access, walk through a turnstile and, of course, be photographed by a series of cameras as they make their way to an assigned cube. Each cubicle is fitted with a computer that contains the test but has been cut off from the Internet to prevent unauthorized mid-exam research. Roaming proctors will be told by professors whether or not a given test allows students to take in textbooks or notes, or whether even a #2 pencil should be considered contraband. Additionally, video cameras pipe a live feed of the room to a bank of security monitors, also watched over by proctors.

Penn State's new testing farm is perhaps the most hardcore one out there at the moment, but it won't be the last. Secure test centers are a growing trend among universities in an effort to kill cheating dead. It's hard to imagine any typical cheating method passing muster here. So, if you go to PSU or any other school where a center like this is planned, it's time to develop some study skills other than writing crib sheets or hiding text into your programmable calculator.

From USA Today

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