A college student recently told me about the latest technology to facilitate students cheat – and it wasn’t ChatGPT. It was an actual, physical gadget advertised in YouTube ads as a bypass for physical paper tests, which are now coming back into fashion as artificial intelligence rips through higher education like a tornado. (One example is AI agents that cannot be stopped from cheating on online tasks).
But if questions printed on physical sheets of paper seem like the composed eye of the storm, think again, because when there’s a will, there’s a way — or a gadget. In this case, a diminutive wand-like device that looks like a TV remote control with a screen and a few buttons on the side.
In practice, the gadget is a text scanner. It “reads” the letters on the page using a diminutive camera placed between two protrusions at one end that, when pressed on the page, turn on the lightweight. The computer on the device processes the words and uses artificial intelligence or the Internet to provide an answer.
YouTube Shorts featuring devices with names like “AI Smart Pen” Or “ChatGPT Pen” appeared on students’ video channels. These POV style videos show “students” taking a “pen” out of their pocket and moving it across exams on a classroom desk. The videos have hundreds of thousands of views. “I needed lessons like this in high school,” the text reads one video showing the #ai #pen gadget that scans a question asking for the name of the first president of the United States. (Answer: George Washington, according to the #ai #pen gadget.)
This is what it looks like in the ads: one swipe of the gadget over a question on a printed test will answer that question.
So I tried one of about 90 devices called “AI Scanner Pen” on Amazon — “Scan Sense Pen, Ai Smart Scanner Pen” for $68.99. It promised me “Instant AI answers for math, history and more” in addition to offline translation into over 60 languages, a camera, Bluetooth connection, and access to music and file storage. I got it in black.
I also found out that it doesn’t work.
It turned on and lit up a page of various test prep study guides I had checked out from the public library. The camera correctly detected words in some cases as you navigated through the question.
But the answers he gave me were gibberish and nonsense. I tried this with algebra, science, and history questions – and none of the answers made sense.
At first I wondered if I had chosen the wrong setting. The menu for the pen we purchased was in Chinese, which made it tough for me to navigate the home screen. I entered screen shots into a language translation app to figure out what each button did. One was for language translation, the other for essay facilitate, and even more for vocabulary facilitate or voice recording.
The setting I wanted and the one I’ve already tested is called Questions and Answers and is supposed to answer scanned questions. Even when the device successfully scanned the words, which didn’t happen often, it offered hilariously inexact options.
For example, when I scanned the question “What layer is directly beneath the Earth’s crust?”, I learned that “there are over five hundred known active volcanoes and thousands of extinct volcanoes in the world.” (Answer: coat. Fact check: According to the Smithsonian’s Global Volcanism Program, the number of “active” volcanoes depends on the time period. There they are 525 volcanoes with confirmed eruptions since 1800.)
Another problem was its size. It is too bulky not to attract attention. Imagine a still classroom, students sitting at desks a few feet apart, and the teacher looking across the room from his desk at the front. Surely nearby peers or a proctor walking the aisles would notice a 6-by-1.25-inch wand illuminating a student’s exam paper?
While it didn’t work well as an answering machine, it could theoretically facilitate translate text between languages. I found six languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Classic Chinese, and English. A quick test from English to Chinese and back to English using a translation app was successful.
College students told me about a much simpler and cheaper way to cheat paper tests: take a photo of the exam question on your phone and upload it to ChatGPT. They assured me that this was relatively simple to do in gigantic lecture halls, even if there was a proctor roaming around the room. Students told me they saw their peers doing this at the beginning of the exam. Later, these peers quickly glance at their phone under their desk while ChatGPT processes the response. Or they peek in during a bathroom break mid-test.
That’s it: cheating has never been easier, maybe not with this device.