The irony is that the test being conducted was for a potential career in teaching in the future…as they say modern problems require technological solutions?
In India, people are very creative when it comes to cheating or preventing candidates from cheating during exams. There was the incident of people climbing the walls of a school building in Bihar to hand cheat sheets to the students a few years ago. This time, it seems like the old cheating tactics are out of the bin and new tech-savvy techniques are already making their way through. One of the latest mind-boggling methods of cheating involves the use of Bluetooth flip-flops. Yes, you heard that right.
Not long ago, the Indian state, Rajasthan was in the news for shutting down internet access during the Rajasthan Teacher Eligibility Test (REET) exam on 26th September. More than 4,000 test centers were set up for the test. By blocking the internet access and banning shoes inside the centers, the authorities were hopeful that they had covered every ground for cheating but little did they know that when there’s a will, there’s a way.
Over two dozen candidates were caught wearing the Bluetooth-connected flip flops which had a sim card concealed inside the sole of the sandal. The phone was connected to a tiny Bluetooth earbud which was embedded deep inside their ears as to avoid being detected easily. And that’s not the most surprising part. Apparently, the Bluetooth flip-flops were sold by criminal gangs for as high as 600,000 rupees or $8,000 per pair. Talk about the lengths some cheaters would go…
“The slippers had a sim card and the candidates had a tiny Bluetooth bug implanted in their ears. In one case, we had to take a doctor’s intervention to find the bug as it was so deeply implanted,” one police officer told The National. The cheaters had created a mastermind plan to have accomplices outside the exam hall who would call the flip flops and dictate the answers to them. A total of 25 people were caught wearing the tech-savvy sandals which could have been greater if they had not been caught before the exam and alerted other centers to ask the candidates to remove their footwear outside the exam halls.
