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Algeria cuts internet nationwide during the baccalaureat exams
- throw9away6 3y agoPeople who can afford starlink have a huge advantage
- capableweb 3y agoDo people who can bring a satellite dish with them to the exam rooms really have to be worried overall about being school performance, one way or another?
- malkosta 3y agoImagine what's the punishment for a cheater on a country that bans internet on this...
- BasedAnon 3y agoYou won't get punished if you don't get caught, and you probably won't get caught
- harvey9 3y agoI'm unclear how this affects cheating. Are the exams not done in paper in large rooms with an invigilator?
- zen_1 3y agoIn certain parts of the world you can bribe the invigilators.
- throwaway3838g 3y agoHow does this relate to internet access?
- wongarsu 3y agoYou bribe them to not notice the phone you are using to help you answer exam questions. Without internet access that's more difficult.
- meitham 3y agoit's about minimising damage in the case of questions leak. The exam paper is the same across the country, so if a paper is leaked from one school, the internet would quickly make the problem nation wide.
- wongarsu 3y agoExcuse yourself to go to the restroom, use phone hidden there the day before. That's a viable method of cheating in many countries, I guess cutting internet access is a way to prevent this and similar exploits.
- userbinator 3y agoI suspect all of Wikipedia's text fits comfortably on a typical user's phone. How does not having Internet access during the exam stop people from accessing data they've already gathered from when they did?
- dist1ll 3y agoWho invigilates the invigilators?
- gumby 3y agoYeah, because nobody would notice when set that up outside the exam hall. You'd do better with an ordinary satphone except you'd stick out like a sore thumb in the exam.
- wcoenen 3y agoStarlink is not available in Algeria: https://www.starlink.com/map https://www.starlink.com/map Even if it was available, it would have to operate with permission of the ARPCE. So it could be shut down along with all the other internet providers. https://www.arpce.dz/fr/service/fai https://www.arpce.dz/fr/service/fai
- cm2187 3y agoThe satellite dish is very discreet.
- vlovich123 3y agoNot just Algeria. Iraq did similarly last month or so. https://cybernews.com/news/internet-outage-iraq-student-exams/ https://cybernews.com/news/internet-outage-iraq-student-exam...
- tpmx 3y agoIt's happening in lots of countries in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MENA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MENA region. Syria, like much of the Arab world, inflicts country-wide internet blackouts during exams https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/06/09/syria-like-much-of-the-arab-world-inflicts-country-wide-internet-blackouts-during-exams https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/06/09/syria-li... (https://archive.is/xaNe2 https://archive.is/xaNe2)
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago> It's happening in lots of countries in the region. Do you think that Iran and Algeria are in the "same region"? What do you call that region?
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoThey are about as far apart as NY and CA and yet we group those into one region so it’s not that strange.
- akiselev 3y agoIt's called the Middle East and North Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MENA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MENA Plenty of geopolitical organizations like the World Bank recognize it as a region: https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/mena https://www.worldbank.org/en/region/mena
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoTIL, thank you. That map on Wikipedia could as well just be called "islamic world".
- c00lio 3y agoWtf? Don't they have businesses and other people using that internet access they are cutting? How do they get away with that?
- BasedAnon 3y agoWell yeah but people just plan around it
- MattGaiser 3y agoExams are so high stakes that it is considered acceptable. In South Korea, you can get a police escort if late for your exam and flights get cancelled to ensure quiet. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202211/1279850.shtml https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202211/1279850.shtml
- moffkalast 3y agoThere is no exam high stakes enough anywhere to warrant this sort of disruptive nonsense.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> no exam high stakes enough anywhere Of course there are. They're manufactured bottlenecks with irrevocable and life-changing consequences. But that doesn't make them less real.
- godelski 3y agoBoth of you are saying quite similar things. I don't think you disagree. The parent was clearly not speaking in the literal sense.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoI think the comment I am replying to argues there is no need to cut the Internet. You and I are saying there is no need for such an exam. Given the exam, the measure makes sense. That it does points to the exam not making sense.
- constantcrying 3y agoQuite insane measures. Are the exams taken at home or is there any other particulate reason? Aren't exams usually only taken under supervision?
- BasedAnon 3y agoThey're taken under supervision afaik
- constantcrying 3y agoAnything else would also surprise me. The stakes seem quite high to gamble on using your phone under those circumstances. And just from a financial standpoint it seems far cheaper to get a couple more teachers to stand around and watch than to shut down the internet for a couple of hours.
- BasedAnon 3y agoMaybe in a first world country that's heavily reliant on the internet sure, shutting down the internet in Algeria doesn't really have much of an impact, people mostly just get mildly annoyed that they can't use Facebook or call their relatives.
- Fermat963 3y agoThey are under supervision in exam centers (high-schools etc). The is no integrity though, so it's not really the students that are not trusted, but the supervisors themselves.
- BasedAnon 3y agoThey do this every year, it's not really odd
- Fezzik 3y agoIt’s odd in that there appears to be only a small handful of countries that do this. North Korea this year isn’t odd compared to North Korea last year, but sure is odd compared to any democratic nation.
- mkl95 3y ago> Algeria has been called a "controlled democracy",[3] or a state where the military and "a select group" of unelected civilians—reportedly known to Algerians as "le pouvoir" ("the power")—make major decisions, such as who should be president. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Algeria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Algeria
- mcny 3y agoJust two sentences prior to your quote, I think it is very relevant who is to blame: > A legacy of Algeria's bloody War of Independence from France (where an estimated 1.5 million Algerians were killed) is a powerful military and security apparatus that put a high value on secrecy.
- realusername 3y agoI would point more towards Russia as a model than France. Military state, powerful oligarchs ruling the country and most of the income coming from fossil fuels.
- bettercallsalad 3y agoEnlighten me but how is it any different than how US operates? In US, sure we vote but most elected members work for their donors and special interest groups who are effectively corporations run by oligarchs. So in other words it’s indirect elected oligarchy. I mean there is a reason why the approval rate of Congress is historically low at their twenties, if it’s truly of the people that would not be the case. It seems worse in Europe where EU and it’s unelected bureaucrats control everything. It seems to me in every world, it’s the selected group of powerful people mostly exerting their influence through money.
- roywiggins 3y agoPeople don't like Congress but they like their own congresspeople well enough. https://news.gallup.com/poll/162362/americans-down-congress-own-representative.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/162362/americans-down-congress-...
- throw101010 3y agoNothing in the article explains why this is the measure the government apparently "has" to use? In most other countries as far as I know exams can be carried with relatively low cheating and no Internet outages, certainly not country wide outages. Anyone has more insights on why Algeria isn't applying common anti-cheating measures or why they are ineffective there?
- mock-possum 3y agoYeah, sounds like pretense to me
- wahnfrieden 3y agoCapriciousness of power
- SpicyLemonZest 3y agoThe policy seems to have originally been enacted in response to a disastrous 2016 exam (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/21/algeria-shuts-internet-prevent-cheating-school-exams https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/21/algeria-shuts-...), where the questions leaked online and over 3/4 of the students had to do a retake.
- option 3y agothis is obviously a test to make sure the gov can do this efficiently. More countries will use similar silly excuses like these
- TZubiri 3y ago[flagged]
- cbg0 3y agoIt would be better to just use jammers in the testing locations, taking down the internet in the whole country is a very hamfisted approach.
- kredd 3y agoGiven the amount of testing centers (probably in the numbers of thousands?), in practice that would be hard to guarantee the effectiveness. Sprinkle some potential failure rate, corruption and etc. I can see why people would support the blackout.
- userbinator 3y agoOr just make the room a Faraday cage.
- drexlspivey 3y agoYeah let's just make every school in the country a faraday cage that sounds simpler
- userbinator 3y agoIf the stakes are as high as the other comments here are saying, it makes sense to have dedicated exam rooms.
- huhtenberg 3y agoCorruption aspects of it notwithstanding, it's an altogether cleaner solution, because if they are doing this every year cheaters would adapt to rely on local and p2p connections instead.
- reaperman 3y agoThe problem is that administrators omit individual sites can be more easily bribed than administrators of overall national infrastructure. And the results can be verified more easily nationwide.
- flangola7 3y agoHow is this achieved in practice? A script that interface -down all the backbone routers?
- nashashmi 3y agoThis is funny, but also a sign of how dedicated the entire country is towards the examinations of its children. I understand this to be the norm in the Middle East and Asia. For children's Exams To be taken very seriously by their parents.
- Richbeach 3y agoit's more a sign of a country not being enable to ensure that there is an acceptable level of cheaters due to 1. corruption 2. huge disparity of outcomes depending on the post-exam access to further education
- nashashmi 3y agoI hate such judgments passed on foreign nations. there are no such things as corruptions when speaking about foreign countries. Instead, they should be more accurately rephrased as securities not enforced. to counter your argument, I would say that Harvard is not able to contain the number of cheaters at its university. Or the business schools are not able to contain the amount of cheating that happened in their education. we do not broad stroke such problems with single word terms. like others have said, this system of internet blackouts is quite common in other countries as well. Some countries will even coordinate television programming to be different because children have to take exams during that week.
- siva7 3y agoGuess suicide rates among teens are also pretty high in countries with extreme measures for an exam.
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- userbinator 3y agoI can understand doing this at exam venues if they're in-person (which they should be now), but this seems like a massive overreach.
- askiiart 3y agoGoogle Translate link: https://www-tsa--algerie-com.translate.goog/linternet-fortement-perturbee-durant-le-1er-jour-du-bac-en-algerie/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-tsa--algerie-com.translate.goog/linternet-fortem...
- ts-alg1123 3y agoBack in 2015/2016 parts of the exam got leaked on Facebook and resulted in a lot (>10,000) students having to redo the exams because of it. Ever since then internet restrictions come around the bac and everyone is aware and just plans around it. I had a family member who had to retake it and they were beyond furious. Prepping to take their bac was a big undertaking and very stressful. I don't agree with the internet shutoff, but I can understand where it's coming from and hope that they figure out a better way to solve the underlying problem.
- lannisterstark 3y agoand yet, shutdowns like these never happen in actual democratic nations. Even during massive protests/terrorist attacks, nothing happens because we realize that information is important.
- ts-alg1123 3y agoI'm not disagreeing with you, as the ability to communicate and disseminate information freely is extremely vital. However I don't think there's a comparable milestone/goal/event in the west as to the bac in Algeria. It is a big deal for them: parties are thrown if you pass, people sob if they don't. Familial expectations often overwhelm the students. Sure we have stuff like SAT/ACT, and some people place emphasis on those, but not to the extent or reach as over there. I don't want to touch on the merits of the exam as a whole, but rather just state that this exam is a big deal to a majority of people over there and they view the shutoff as a necessary inconvenience.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoIn Spain we have a similar exam that all students must pass to access university, and where the grade decides which degrees you can study. It's also a pretty big deal, maybe not for everyone but at least for people who want to study degrees with high demand, like medicine. We don't cut the internet.
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- lannisterstark 3y agolol India does the same thing. Hell they do it for 'protests' as well. Kashmir for the longest time had 2G/GPRS/EDGE mobile data service at best. Why? Because they could protest. They did the same for that farmers strike. ...funny what authoritarian governments use as a pretense to stay in power. How dare someone speak out against them and organize a protest. No, no internet for you.
- adamnemecek 3y agoThese high pressure exams are counter productive. But so is the rest of the educational system.
- donohoe 3y agoTypo in HN headline. It is "baccalaureate", not "baccalaureat".
- gordian-not 3y agoCommon in some arab countries Sudan, Syria, Iraq and partially in Jordan https://www.accessnow.org/empty-promises-shutdowns-exams/ https://www.accessnow.org/empty-promises-shutdowns-exams/
- AHOHA 3y agoProbably Elon is behind it, more starlink users!! Joking aside, what’s the percentage of the students to think it’s justifiable to cut off the internet for everyone else? Business, other education like higher ones, emergency, other services!? Are people this corrupt right now to the point that the government doesn’t trust any other policy will be applied evenly? Or are these just a decoy for other measures? I think the problem is deeper though, in the education system itself, if your education system can’t properly measure your students performance and abilities, unless it’s done in an enclosed, no internet zone for few hours, probably measuring only the ability to memorize few information or equations rather than how to properly apply it, your education system is the problem, not the students. How come the US for example don’t cut off the internet because students at MIT are doing some exam?
- MattGaiser 3y ago> How come the US for example don’t cut off the internet because students at MIT are doing some exam? It is not some exam. It is the exam which determines your future in nations which rely on single exams for university admission. Imagine if the SAT determined nearly everything about your future and you had a single shot at it. Now, I still doubt the USA would block the internet over it, but I could easily imagine jammers being used around test centres.
- AHOHA 3y ago>It is the exam which determines your future in nations which rely on single exams for university admission. How’s that even fair for the students or even accepted as a criteria to consider someone is eligible or not?! Say I want to go to engineering school, how’s memorizing anything for that exam will be slightly beneficial for my future?!
- MattGaiser 3y agoI am not arguing it is fair, but it is how their system works and that given the stakes, their actions are less absurd (not all the way to reasonable) than they appear.
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- cat_plus_plus 3y agoProbably Internet is not as critical in Algeria as it is in US, so people see it as a worthwhile tradeoff for a limited time period. I am actually impressed that they care this much about education, could fix a lot of their problems in the next generation. Imagine Americans being asked to put away their phones for a week to prevent cheating in schools?
- cgcg19 3y agoI am from algeria internet matter to me I use internet to work remotely they are violating my rights they don't care about their people gov do what they want ....
- cgcg19 3y agoAs an Algerian gov violated my rights in all ways i use internet for my living as most of algeria people Gov don't care what we think or what dommage they apply to us they even don't offer a compensation for they days they cut internet I feel like am living in tenth world not the third world Please pray for me i feel like am trapped