Test-takers busted for using Bluetooth-connected flip-flops to cheat

Yeah, I assume the person who has access to the test questions and answers and relays them to you is included in the price.

Yah, it would have to be. Unless they’ve out-Appled Apple and come up with a battery small enough to go all the way into the ear canal. Plus, if they could, they wouldn’t need the foot-phone. BT and even BTLE have plenty of range to get outside the exam hall to an accomplice.

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Because that doesn’t scale. My graduating class in Computer Science alone had 500 people in it. The year’s class at the entire University was probably 15,000. Everyone has to be tested within a week or so to keep the process moving.

Claude Shannon was there first in the shoe electronics field :slight_smile: I have noted that there seems to be a lack of consensus about who did what and when in these tales of Shannon and mathematician Edward Thorp in both the shoe computer caper and the blackjack operation. There also seems to be a lot of hand waving about whether they made any significant money doing it. A later follower of these guys, another physicist, Doyne Farmer, repeated a lot of this work in the '70s, with similar obscurity about results. Fun topic, anyway. Thorp and Farmer went on to be hedge fund managers.

The story of the MIT blackjack team is similar and interesting for the same reasons. Once portable computing was a known tool and the casinos started checking for it, MIT students decided to try parallel processing with more humans instead.

Like with Shannon though, it seems like they didn’t really make any real money doing it. The margins are too fragile and it’s easy to get caught. One technical or social mistake sets you back weeks of work. Not a good way to make a living, never mind getting rich quickly.

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or so they say :wink: Gambling “profit” is taxable in the US, (and the consequences of being perceived to have “cheated” gambling operators are perhaps severe) so grain of salt may be in order. I would think blackjack card counting in the early days could well have been profitable as there were no countermeasures in place and the technique is easy to implement without technical assistance. The roulette caper, though, seems less likely to work although it is certainly the most interesting. “Profitable” of course being relative…long hours low return.

A class with 500 it’s a mess. I suppose the class is also with 500 people following a lesson. I remember the first year of university the class like these. The exams were totally selective and only 50% of people on average got to second year. Yes some exams were written, then only if you got right at least 15 on 30 questions, you had the chance to go to the oral exam, where you were grilled for 5 minutes and there were 3 teachers in parallel.

It’s certainly possible they hid how much they made, though from the books and documentaries I’ve read about them, it sounds like in the end they just kinda broke even. It was fun, but got increasingly difficult to fool the casinos, and they never really got over the hump of getting rich quickly enough for it to be worthwhile.

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