In my previous favorite blog post (the problem with online school in its current state) I alluded to the biggest issue with online school: cheating. I have since graduated with mediocre grades from the self proclaiming number 1 public university in America to which I have landed a job outside of my major which didn't once look at my grades or ask about school.
Because of this bad taste in my mouth and slight buzz from this beautiful Saturday night, I thought I'd finally write about how I would cheat my way through any school in the world.
Since writing that post I've dove deep into software development and with AI, it's become all too easy. Because of this, the method I would use below might be a little geeky for most, but if done correctly, would result in you passing all of your online exams with whatever score you wanted to get. So if you don't understand what I'm saying, just copy it into ChatGPT and ask it to explain it to you like the 5 year old you are.
Without further ado, here is my foolproof plan for cheating in school:
Step 1: purchase a 'Screen Crab' from Hak 5. This device is made for hackers, which we technically are... in the school sense. What it does is allow for you to take periodic screenshots or video streams from your computer without being detected, then store or send that data to a remote API.
Given that nearly every online exam uses honorlock, which is a browser based chrome extension, it wouldn't be able to detect that this device is plugged into your computer.
Ok... so you can take screenshots or videos from your computer undetected... so what?
Well if you're not technical and want to get gritty, you could immediately use this by having a friend sit right next to you (out of view of your computer camera), view the output of these screenshots or video in their own computer (using hak5 cloud for real time outputs) and use ChatGPT to find the answers.
If you're a geeky loner like me, you would probably spend a night or 2 building a system that allows you to send the screenshots to a server (FastAPI or lambda function) that simply takes the screenshot in as input to a ChatGPT API and returns the answer. The answer would then be sent to your phone (via a custom app or text (Twilio) if you sign out of iCloud on your computer) which is propped up in front of you on your computer so the camera can't see and so it doesn't look suspicious.
What the end result would look like is this: Before your exam, ensure that the screen crab is plugged in and ready to go, then when the exam starts, begin the periodic screenshots of your screen and prop your phone up horizontally in front of you. Act like you're fully doing the exam while you're realistically doodling on your scratch paper or writing down fake equations. All the while you're getting the answers onto your phone in front of you.
So, um yea that's my blog post for how to cheat in any online class. Are we cooked? um yea probably... we're probably cooked.
But I'll tell you what! Colleges are extra cooked. Because if this happens then, like they're going to have to go back to in person. Because there's literally no way to stop this, they can only either ignore it which they currently are, or go back to in person completely which would suck for both the universities and the students. So yea, sorry to burst your bubble.