How to stop exam cheating: put teenagers in cages

Stupid idea 101

By Chris Williams • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 25th September 2006 10:50 GMT

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A psychology professor has come up with a brilliant and practical plan to save Britain from the epidemic of technology-facilitated exam cheating which is jeopardising the economy and the moral fortitude of our youth.

Professor Jean Underwood of Nottingham Trent University was commissioned by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to look in to how to nix cheating kids. She said: "There is a rising fear that technology is fuelling this problem. There are enough people doing it to be worried."

Her plan is as simple as it is audacious: insulate every exam hall in the country from mobile communications by installing a giant Faraday cage.

A Faraday cage is a big metal enclosure that insulates the inside of the cage from outside electromagnetism. The Pentagon installed one at enormous expense some years ago.

Read more about Underwood's well thought-out solution here at the Daily Mail.

Forgetting the fact that it would do nothing to stop pre-loaded devices being used, we don't know about you, but at our school the buildings budget was mostly spent on (a) patching holes in the decrepit roof and (b) thrice-winterly engineering call-outs when the boiler conked out at the first sign of a snowflake.

Oh yeah, and to pay for the 100-foot-high brass Van Der Graaf generator that the physics department successfully lobbied for in the 1950s (What's a physics dept? - Ed) ®

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