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I've seen a story of HS kids 'cheating' by having one kid brodacast test answers via tapping their pencil, which worked until the teacher who knew Morse code re

I've seen a story of HS kids 'cheating' by having one kid brodacast test answers via tapping their pencil, which worked until the teacher who knew Morse code realized what was going on and put a stop to it.

gwbas1c 1y ago
Gotta give the kids credit for working so hard to learn a skill like that.
dghlsakjg 1y ago
That’s likely apocryphal. Morse requires you to know when the tone both starts and stops in order to differentiate a ‘dah’ from a break indicating a new letter or word or even just a ‘dit’. Tapping a pencil only gives you the start of a tone since the pencil lift is silent. There is no real way to distinguish between a short tone and a pause (letter e) and a long tone (letter t) if you don’t know when the tone ends and a pause begins. The same trope is shown in movies. You cannot tap Morse code if the recipient cannot hear when the tap ends. In other words, the receiver has no way of knowing whether you sent an e or t without there being a signal that the pencil has lifted. Note that e or t can be substituted for any other number of paired letters.
- cortesoft 1y ago
  Couldn't you just use like the tip of the pencil for a dot and the eraser end for a dash? Use the tonal differences instead of duration?
  - dghlsakjg 1y ago
    Yes. You could just invent a different code. The other issue is that it can take weeks of study to even reach a minimal level of fluency in Morse. 5 WPM is the basic metric. You could tap faster with much more practice, but the proctor would almost certainly notice the student furiously tapping patterns onto their desk with their pencil. To review you need to devote weeks of study to learn an encoding that is poorly suited for the task, and that has a very slow transmission rate so that you can transmit a message that everyone in the room might be able to hear? Morse just isn’t a practical way to cheat.
    - cortesoft 1y ago
      Depends on the test. A multiple choice or true/false test would be easy to convey.
fortran77 1y ago
It's very hard to decode morse from just "taps". You need to be able to hear two distinct symbols, "dash" (long) and "dot" (short) and the spaces. I remember in school we used to be able to do morse if we could see each other, using one finger for dot and one for dash, but we'd copy by looking at the fingers, not the sound of the taps.
0xdeadbeefbabe 1y ago
Could have been a tap code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code

gwbas1c 1y ago

Gotta give the kids credit for working so hard to learn a skill like that.

dghlsakjg 1y ago

That’s likely apocryphal. Morse requires you to know when the tone both starts and stops in order to differentiate a ‘dah’ from a break indicating a new letter or word or even just a ‘dit’. Tapping a pencil only gives you the start of a tone since the pencil lift is silent. There is no real way to distinguish between a short tone and a pause (letter e) and a long tone (letter t) if you don’t know when the tone ends and a pause begins. The same trope is shown in movies. You cannot tap Morse code if the recipient cannot hear when the tap ends. In other words, the receiver has no way of knowing whether you sent an e or t without there being a signal that the pencil has lifted. Note that e or t can be substituted for any other number of paired letters.

cortesoft 1y ago
Couldn't you just use like the tip of the pencil for a dot and the eraser end for a dash? Use the tonal differences instead of duration?
- dghlsakjg 1y ago
  Yes. You could just invent a different code. The other issue is that it can take weeks of study to even reach a minimal level of fluency in Morse. 5 WPM is the basic metric. You could tap faster with much more practice, but the proctor would almost certainly notice the student furiously tapping patterns onto their desk with their pencil. To review you need to devote weeks of study to learn an encoding that is poorly suited for the task, and that has a very slow transmission rate so that you can transmit a message that everyone in the room might be able to hear? Morse just isn’t a practical way to cheat.
  - cortesoft 1y ago
    Depends on the test. A multiple choice or true/false test would be easy to convey.

fortran77 1y ago

It's very hard to decode morse from just "taps". You need to be able to hear two distinct symbols, "dash" (long) and "dot" (short) and the spaces. I remember in school we used to be able to do morse if we could see each other, using one finger for dot and one for dash, but we'd copy by looking at the fingers, not the sound of the taps.

0xdeadbeefbabe 1y ago

Could have been a tap code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tap_code