One Texas school district fines students $15 to get back their cellular phones if they are confiscated and a second school is considering the same policy, according to an article in the Star-Telegram. The article provides good information about the problem of camera phones in schools, such as using them for cheating on tests and taking photos of students in locker rooms.
The article describes how a teacher caught a student sending photos of answers to a multiple choice test to another student across the room. Another example of camera phone abuse in schools includes a boy student who asked a girl student to take photos of girls undressing in the locker room.
Malcolm Turner, the executive director of student services for the Arlington, Texas school district says, "She was taking photos, and nobody knew....We disciplined both of them."
Camera phones good enough to cheat?
There have been many articles in the press about how camera phones are used to take photos of school tests and also for "identity theft" where someone takes a photo of your credit card. I've taken photos of credit cards and it's very tough to get a clear enough photo unless you're close to the credit card and the lighting is good enough.
To check out the test-cheating possibility, I just grabbed a copy of yesterday's Washington Post and snapped a photo (see below). As you can see, the image certainly is good enough to be read on the Web as well as on the handset's screen.
For another view, look here.
The lighting I used was from a low-wattage energy saving fluorescent bulb that might be worse than the bright overhead lights in a schoo. Also, the body text of the article probably has smaller fonts than what's used in a test (although I haven't taken school tests for about 100 years) and the newsprint probably is fuzzier than a sharper-looking test paper.
Yep, it's certainly possible
I also used the camera phone's digital zoom to take a photo of the same article. Although the text certainly was much blurrier, I could see where the zoom -- despite the often useless value of a digital zoom -- could increase the text size enough to make it readable when photographing a piece of paper farther away.
However, I used my best camera phone, the 1.3 megapixel Nokia 7610. The 7610 produces good photos (check out a test Weblog I just created using one of TypePad's new templates).
The 7610 also has a good screen and I could indeed read the article (yes, it was difficult) on the LCD. The 7610 isn't yet available in the U.S., although it will be by, I think, the end of the year.
Getting better all the time
Most camera phones in the U.S. don't take such good photos or have good screens. But some do and already three one megapixel camera phones are available in the U.S.
The bottom line: Cheating with camera phones is not only possible but also will increase as phones produce better images.
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