The College Board Is Banning Students From Using Smart Glasses During the SATs [View all]

[highplainsdem]

Source: Gizmodo

It’s not just theoretical. The prospect of students using smart glasses to cheat on tests is apparently so real that the College Board, which administers the SATs, just banned students from using smart glasses starting in the spring. Here’s the official wording from the College Board itself:

“Smart glasses are prohibited during testing. Students with prescription smart glasses will need to remove them or test another day with standard glasses.”

It’s not much in the way of backlash, but it says a lot without saying a lot. And the thing is, the College Board is absolutely justified in banning smart glasses. Having used quite a few pairs over the past year, I can say without a doubt that they’re uniquely capable cheating tools, and it’s not necessarily the screens that are the problem.

Arguably, the bigger threat is that many smart glasses are tethered to chatbots like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, and if you have access to chatbots, you have access to lots of answers that are technically supposed to be coming from your head, not the internet. Summoning that information is also extremely easy. Meta’s Ray-Bans, for example, can hear your voice at a very low volume, making cheating in a quiet room feasible.

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Read more: https://gizmodo.com/the-college-board-is-banning-students-from-using-smart-glasses-during-the-sats-2000718422

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And then there are the built-in cameras, which not only make smart glasses nasty surveillance devices that no one should ever be allowed to wear, but can take pictures of test questions for the built-in AI to answer.

And some smart glasses like Meta's have built-in POV video calling through WhatsApp, so you can ask a friend to help you cheat.

And one brand of smart glasses doesn't have camera and audio but has the AI showing you a screen controlled by a smart ring you move your thumb over, so that fidgeting student might simply be cheating.

Seriously, there's no good, ethical reason for smart glasses.