High school graduates use mobile phones to cheat themselves through exams, schools try to prevent the fraud with modern technology. A British manufacturer of cell phone blockers is expected to receive increased demand from Germany – while the use of devices in this country is still controversial.
The thing itself looks like a cell phone, not quite modern anymore, a black box with a small antenna on it. When the students write their Baccalaureate examinations in the Gymnasium Odenthal near Bergisch Gladbach these days, the box is on the teacher’s table.
It is not an old-school pedagogue cell phone, but a device for locating mobile phones. The Gymnasium in North Rhine-Westphalia is one of the few German schools that use the device – and publicly admit that.
Pupils had been upset over a fraud case last year, in which a high school graduate had written off large parts of answers from the Internet. No teacher had noticed anything. A name has not been misplaced, says the headmistress Angelika Schmoll-Engels.
Frequency meter for 150 euros
In the case of students and parents, however, the desire had arisen to prevent fraud in the future. Although the phones had previously been submitted before the exam, but the teachers were many old, discarded cell phones without sim card noticed. Her newer, Internet-enabled devices kept students secretly.
So the school bought on the Internet for 150 euros a frequency meter, the detected mobile phones in the vicinity. However, the device can not measure the exact position. That would be forbidden for data protection reasons. Undisputed, the situation is not synonymous with frequency meters. In Schleswig-Holstein, the ministry responsible prohibited the use in February. They had been placed in a classroom and in the toilet of a gymnasium.
At the push of a button, the whole school paralyzes
Whether this is allowed, must first be judicially examined, said a spokesman for the Ministry of Education in Kiel at that time. The Dusseldorf state government sees the relaxed. If the sender can not collect personal data, you will see no problem. As early as 2007, a Waldorf school in Stuttgart had developed and installed the mobile phone “Paul” himself.
How many schools in this country use DF or even cell phone jammer can not be determined. A British manufacturer of mobile phone blockers boasted in the Internet portal “teacher friend” with the fact that he noted an increased demand from Germany. Although they are banned in German schools, but still enjoyed great popularity.
Schools would not only buy mobile stations, but entire base stations to install in false ceilings and paralyze the whole mobile network of the school by remote control. In Germany, only prisons are officially working with this technique. And schools like that would rather not be compared.