Call me old fashioned, but I think questions should be answered in the order they are asked.

Then, by all means, feel free to do so.

 

Then, by all means, feel free to do so.

You were asked:

 

You were asked:

View attachment 370066

You insist on equating different things, namely bad grammar and the evolution of word definitions by way of zero derivation, whereas I'm only interested in addressing the latter as I have no qualms with objections over the former.

 

When somebody owes you ten bucks, that's his problem. When somebody owes you 136 million bucks, that's your problem.

Spoiler

 

When somebody owes you ten bucks, that's his problem. When somebody owes you 136 million bucks, that's your problem.

Spoiler

View attachment 370083

When Elon Musk owes anybody money, they have a problem.

 

https://arstechnica.com/culture/202...-so-badly-that-58000-students-must-retake-it/

Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico’s largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a “lockdown” browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June.

It was a disaster.

When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so.

The story was even worse at the highest of the high end. Between 2021 and 2025, 0.9 percent of test takers scored 110 or more; this year, 5.5 percent did so.

The surge in top scores led to accusations of widespread cheating, and UNAM appointed a commission of experts to investigate the situation.

 

https://arstechnica.com/culture/202...-so-badly-that-58000-students-must-retake-it/

Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico’s largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a “lockdown” browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June.

It was a disaster.

When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so.

The story was even worse at the highest of the high end. Between 2021 and 2025, 0.9 percent of test takers scored 110 or more; this year, 5.5 percent did so.

The surge in top scores led to accusations of widespread cheating, and UNAM appointed a commission of experts to investigate the situation.

This has all the stench of a preexisting quota policy. I'm willing to bet that the real numbers are closer to the AI assisted result, and that the previous statistics are nothing more than manually trimmed evaluations that would guarantee that the state sponsored university is not overflowed by the surge of new recruits that would overwhelm its government assigned resources. Regardless of the amazing talent that would go to waste.

 

https://arstechnica.com/culture/202...-so-badly-that-58000-students-must-retake-it/

Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico’s largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a “lockdown” browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June.

It was a disaster.

When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so.

The story was even worse at the highest of the high end. Between 2021 and 2025, 0.9 percent of test takers scored 110 or more; this year, 5.5 percent did so.

The surge in top scores led to accusations of widespread cheating, and UNAM appointed a commission of experts to investigate the situation.

Gee, big surprise.

When I was teaching at the Air Force Academy, one of the very top LMS (Learning Management System) vendors came to the Computer Science Department because they wanted us to see if they could break out of their lockdown browser that they had already released and that many schools were using. They seemed real confident that they had it down and, I think, were just looking for a shiny gem to be able to point to from an advertising talking point (but that's pure speculation on my part). Barely into the initial meeting where they were describing what they wanted us to try, one of the faculty got up and went back to her office. She came back about fifteen minutes later and demonstrated how you could break out of the lockdown browser, go out and serve the Internet, and then come back into the lockdown browser without the system knowing any better.

Now, granted, this gal was scary competent. But all of these schemes for remote monitoring fail to given even a fraction of attention to all of the low tech ways that people can figure out how to defeat them. They intend to assume that the cheater has to be acting alone, that they have to only be using a single computer, and that they have to defeat the system's guardrails in order to cheat.

Consider the following: The test taker's HDMI output is fed to a video capture card on a second computer in another room. A person in that room therefore sees what is being displayed by the test and then uses whatever resources they want to, which could include a team of people in the room, the Internet, LLMs, paid professionals in Bangladesh, or whatever, and they then present the answer, whether it's a text box or a circle over the letter of the correct answer. Then they simply use an HDMI splitter to replicate the image on their screen back onto the test taker's machine. The hardware needed to do this, and HDMI capture card and an HDMI splitter, are cheap (each can be had for about $10) and there's no need to use anything beyond that in the way of software, though a simple Python script could make things more convenient. The lockdown browser can't detect the fact that it is connected to a video capture device (though you might need to use a capture card that can be configured to act as a basic display). The camera that is viewing the test taker would have a very hard time detecting anything amiss by examining the test takers actions or eye movements. They are looking at the actual image that they are expected to be looking at, with the cheating material simply being superimposed right next to where the test taker needs to be looking to answer the question anyway.

 

This has all the stench of a preexisting quota policy. I'm willing to bet that the real numbers are closer to the AI assisted result, and that the previous statistics are nothing more than manually trimmed evaluations that would guarantee that the state sponsored university is not overflowed by the surge of new recruits that would overwhelm its government assigned resources. Regardless of the amazing talent that would go to waste.

If I understand what you are claiming, in previous offerings six times as many people scored 110/120, but the university artificially lowered the scores of 5/6-ths of them to keep the enrollment numbers down. But, now, for some reason, they aren't simply doing the same exact thing with the current scores. Okay, let's say that there is some technical means that prevents them from doing that with the new system. Since the university knows what they've been doing and that they couldn't keep doing it, why would they agree to adopting the new system? Especially when it is quite easy to make the case that the possibility for cheating is too high.

Which is easier to believe? That explanation, or that a significant fraction of students taking a very weakly controlled entrance exam are likely to find simple ways to cheat?

Just look at what happens in quite a few places, including parents climbing on the outside of multi-story buildings right out in the open to pass answers to their kids taking exams.

Parental Guidance, Bihar Style. Parents Help Class 10 Students in Large-Scale Cheating