If You Think Cheating Is Rampant Now, Just Wait Till Google Glasses Are Here

When I was a senior in high school, we thought we were getting away with murder, copying calculus programs from the class genius onto our TI-84 graphing calculators and using them to solve the hardest test problems. Our technologically backwards teacher, who could barely operate the overhead projector, never had a clue.

How the high school kids of today would laugh at us. Who needs a graphing calculator when you have an iPhone?

Smartphones, tablets, Google and even Facebook are all tools with great educational potential, but they’re increasingly being used by students striving to avoid learning, according to reports by New York magazine and The New York Times.  While both delved into the recent cheating scandal at Manhattan‘s elite Stuyvesant High School, this is no mere upper-class problem. In a 2010 survey, one in three students said they had plagiarized something from the internet, and almost 60% said they had cheated on a test.

Here’s the thing: The cheating epidemic is about to get worse — much worse. A few months from now, Google will begin selling the wearable heads-up display it calls Project Glass and everyone else has already dubbed Google Glasses. (In fact, you can already buy a prototype if you have $1,500.)

While Google Glasses are pretty conspicuous (read: ugly), it can’t be long before Google or someone else develops a pair that looks like ordinary eyeglasses. Think about what that means. Under the guise of vision correction, any student will be able to wear an internet-connected computer capable of hands-free communication and photo-sharing.

No more trying to conceal the iPhone in your lap. You won’t need thumbs to operate your Google Glasses, either, just tiny head gestures. Future devices will probably respond to eye movements.

It’s the future of cheating. And the educators of today had better start thinking now about how they’re going to handle it. Will there be spot-checks of eyewear to make sure they don’t contain microchips? Will classrooms come equipped with cell-phone jammers? Or, perhaps, will curriculums evolve to feature tests that can’t be gamed, made up of up questions that demand creative problem-solving rather than memorization and recall?

Or is that last scenario the real science fiction?

By the way, that class genius who wrote the programs we all used to pass calculus? He works at Google now.