6 ms·
In my undergrad days, my sibling's medical college (KMC Mangalore) had an interesting case where the student had hired the service of a rice-engraving artist to
by srvmshr 5y ago
In my undergrad days, my sibling's medical college (KMC Mangalore) had an interesting case where the student had hired the service of a rice-engraving artist to etch complete medical manuals onto the sides of metallic ballpoint pens. He was wearing a high powered lens as bifocals.
He was caught because he was noticed shuffling a wad of pens too often & then the bifocal glasses were peculiar, prompting some investigation.
He had paid the grain-engraving artist to the tune of $30,000-35,000 for the whole set (2006). It is a lot of money!
- exikyut 5y agoThe massive irony is that the rice-engraving artist may well have then stood the chance to get a decent head start in medicine. I've long theorized that copying/transcribing information can be a great way to meditate in a way conducive to retaining and learning new data. Depends on their skill level, and how much focus there was on the process of engraving vs temporarily memorizing the next block of info to transcribe.
- agumonkey 5y agoI never went to med school, but in HS I had my beloved modded HP48 that could store loads of text. I didn't manage to wire it to my computer so I resorted to type everything manually. After a whole day of char-by-char input.. I knew everything by heart and didn't need to look it up in the calculator.
- no1lives4ever 5y agoReminds me of my attempts to make cheat sheets that I would use during exams. I would write out a small cheat sheet the night before I never needed to use those cheat sheets as I would always remember whatever I had written on them. After a few cases when I remembered the whole contents of those sheets, I would just use them as last minute revision aid and discard them before getting into the examination hall.
- agumonkey 5y agoGood old the last minute L1 cache warm up.
- yonaguska 5y agoI had some professors in high school that would encourage us to write a cheat sheet, with the caveat that you had to fit everything into a standard note card. Unfortunately, there was a foreign student that was so ahead of everyone, that he simply increased the difficulty of the tests and would curve them, excluding that one student from the curve. It was normal for most of the class to get 60s-70s, while this student would get 90s on his exams. I say unfortunately, but only jokingly.
- munk-a 5y agoOne of my high school teachers used an accumulating curve just for this reason - a number of pre-written tests were rotated out pretty randomly and your grade was scaled in relation to everyone who had ever taken the test. It did fail to account for anomalies like the teacher discussing a subject particularly poorly one year but it was pretty fair feeling.
- maximus-decimus 5y agoYou would think you would ignore outliers when bell-curving. "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%"
- rbanffy 5y ago> "Timmy missed the exam because her grand-ma is dead, so I'm giving him a 0 everybody else an extra 10%" Years later, police discovered evidence Sally replaced Timmy’s grandma’s insulin bottle contents with glucose in order to pass that test.
- ummwhat 5y agoEven worse, sounds like a perverse incentive to kill Timmy's grandma.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoIt also had infrared so you could even use chat apps. It was attenuated for short range precisely for this reason but obviously that protection was useless in the hands of electronics students. I still have my 48GX. Though I never used it at an exam. As computer science student I simply never had any exams that required a calculator. I just had it for personal interests.
- Joeri 5y agoI only ever used that infrared to control the classroom vcr, to the absolute befuddlement of the teacher. Only time I’ve seen someone tap the side of a vcr to fix whatever is broken with it. I used the serial cable to hook it up to my computer and loaded it with minigames, to play during class. You can tell I was not the best of students.
- db48x 5y agoI remember the time I took a 1200 baud modem and a phone cord to school with me so that I could log into the county library system, which provided shell accounts, and check my email during class. My physics teacher didn’t seem very appreciative, but the kids with lesser calculators were impressed.
- agumonkey 5y agoIt was just a resistor away from full range ? I keep dreaming of modding a 48 series to snatch an esp mcu in it.
- shinjitsu 5y agoIn my high school a few years before me there was a legendary cheating ring that would tap out the answers to each other in Morse code which was presented as tapping a pencil eraser on the desk like they were thinking. Unfortunately for them it was long enough ago that one of the teachers knew Morse code and so it didn't last.
- glfharris 5y agoHow is that any different from the rote memorisation that's been the mainstay of most education systems up to the 21st century? It doesn't really aid understanding, doesn't incorporate active recall, and tends to become inefficient for a large corpus of knowledge.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago"Doc, I have this small lump in my back that doesn't hurt, but hurts if I poke it." "Oh, I remember I saw something like that in school, let me Google it!" Medicine, like law, involves a lot of memorization.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoBad example though. I'm sure MDs actually look a lot of stuff up because they can't remember every fringe thing during their entire career :) Also it's an ever changing field of course.
- alasdair_ 5y ago>"Oh, I remember I saw something like that in school, let me Google it!" This seems like a good thing, not a bad thing. I'd MUCH prefer to have a doctor verify a diagnosis with reference material than to have them rely on their memory.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoIt's a double-edged sword. If he googled "lipoma" or similar it would be good, if he googled "painful lump when poked" I would be very wary of him. Double wary if he clicks on a random blog.
- glfharris 5y agoBy chance, I am a doctor. I spend a lot of time looking things up, even things I'm 80% sure about. Yes, it's useful to have that knowledge already, and to that I'd say that copying out a textbook is a poor way to learn. It's far better to know the processes behind things or to learn through experience.
- datavirtue 5y agoI have to learn maths by engraving the algorithms in source code.
- chx 5y agoAt university one of the exams allowed a single sheet of handwritten paper to be brought in. People got real damn creative in squeezing as much information they could on it, completely oblivious to the fact they actually learned the subject matter while preparing their "cheat sheet".
- CodesInChaos 5y agoThat does not match my experience. The primary benefit of these papers is that you can look up the difficult to remember stuff during the exam (mostly formulas and precise definitions in my case).
- menage 5y agoBut you get to do that in real life too.
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoBrb learning rice engraving. Or maybe I'll just buy a laser engraver.
- lnxg33k1 5y agoWow, when I was young my father sold bijoux and he also used to create necklaces and bracelet on the fly with names of people written on grain of rice, he used to sell those for like 5.000 liras (in Italy, in the 90s, before euros, it would be 2.50 euros right now), if I knew I would have told him to start offering his services to cheating students, instead of tourists in Positano :D
- InCityDreams 5y agoYou missed the bit where L5.000 became €5.
- lnxg33k1 5y agoOh yeah I didn't miss it, but I guess "technically" it is 2.50 euros, but yeah practically I would even argue it's 10euros :D edit: but still far from 35000 dollars :D
- cortesoft 5y agoThe bigger question is why are we testing for things that can be looked up that quickly on a tiny grain of rice that probably doesn't have a good indexing system? Like, if there was a question that was easy to answer if you could look at a reference sheet, then why is it important to memorize it? If the test take could understand the question enough to know where to look it up, isn't that good enough?
- hokumguru 5y agoBecause in the medical field peoples' lives are literally at stake. Doctors absolutely do research for their patients in the real world but a base level of knowledge is still absolutely required. If someone is not able to answer the "easy" questions then how do we know that they won't falter when faced with an actual challenging one. Would you hire an engineer who couldn't write a FizzBuzz without looking it up?
- alasdair_ 5y ago>Would you hire an engineer who couldn't write a FizzBuzz without looking it up? Yes? I mean, even after 20 years of writing code professionally, I still don't remember the exact syntax for main methods for each language. Is it public static void main(String args[]) {} for Java, or is it something else? Will I remember that even when I've mostly been coding in Golang this week? Probably not.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoIt is public static void main(String args[]) {} (inside a public class with the same name as the file). Alternatively, you could do public static void main(String... args) {}; that would also work, probably because it's compiled down to the same thing in the JVM. (It doesn't work if you have named string arguments before the varargs, so it's unlikely it's meant to work.) I don't remember any of this. I don't remember that it's int main(int argc, char *argv[]); in C, or fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn ::std::error::Error> {} in Rust, or package main \n func main() {} in Go; I derive it anew each time based on my understanding of the language. And I wouldn't hire me to write C code, because I can't remember where the `const`s go. All I remember is that you shouldn't really use them here, because you're expected to be able to modify argv (and sometimes you have to, e.g. to redact passwords that somebody foolishly provided on the command line). And I remember that #include <stdio.h> lets you use size_t, but don't ask me why. Then again, I guess I'm proving your point. I could write fizzbuzz easily in C – perhaps more easily than in any language I'm good at – but that doesn't make me a good person to hire if you want a C programmer.
- throwaway81523 5y agoI think that could have been done with photo reduction?
- yiyv 5y agoConsidering for how much KMC sold its seats back then I’d say 30K USD was still a bargain. Now their engineering school’s seats are sold for more than that.