An Exam Is Always a Holiday

More and more of my students wear glasses these days. Stylish. Also helpful during exams.

This is no longer hypothetical. The College Board banned smart glasses from the SAT starting this past March, prescription models included: you take them off, or you come back another day. Chinese universities have disciplined students for wearing them in finals, and a group at HKUST wired an ordinary pair to a chatbot and had the wearer read answers off the lens in a controlled test. A Korean YouTuber, by way of demonstration, worked through thirty practice exam problems in eighteen minutes and scored 96 out of 100 — the sort of video that gets a policy written within the week.

Naturally, the other side has equipment too.

Nearby Glasses is an Android app that listens for Bluetooth advertising frames and raises an alert when it sees a manufacturer ID belonging to Meta, Luxottica or Snap. A sociology professor wrote it in about two days, and not for proctors at all — he was worried about being filmed in public. Exam duty simply adopted it.

Which is the charming part: it detects a company, not a lens. A VR headset three rows back sets it off. One reviewer added Apple’s ID out of curiosity and his phone lit up with every device in the room. In a lecture hall of two hundred, this is a classifier with a magnificent false positive rate whose one reliable effect is a professor staring at a phone instead of at the room.

The joke is older than the hardware. In Gaidai’s Operation Y (1965) a student turns up to an oral exam with a bandage over one ear — a toothache, he explains — and a flower in his buttonhole. An exam, he announces, is always a holiday for him. The bandage holds an earpiece, the flower holds a microphone, and a friend with a transmitter sits somewhere out of sight with the textbook open. The professor listens for a while, then reaches into his desk and switches on a shortwave jammer. An A for the invention, he says, a fail for the subject. Then he leans toward the flower and remarks that the professor may well be a fool, but the professor has the hardware.

Sixty years on, every part of that rig has been miniaturized into a pair of frames — except the professor’s part, which has been outlawed. Operating a jammer in the United States is a federal offense for everyone outside a handful of authorized federal users, and the FCC has stated plainly that school systems get no exemption. It once traced a jammer to a locked cabinet in a high school metal shop, where it had been quietly blocking every call in the building, emergency calls included.

So the modern professor gets an app that tells him there is a Luxottica product somewhere within thirty feet, and the rest of us go back to paper, handwriting, and the occasional question asked out loud. Gaidai’s professor had the one piece of equipment his successors are not allowed to own.