Exam Cheats To Be Thwarted By Gadgets

Exam chiefs are employing an armoury of James Bond-style gadgets to crack down on teenagers cheating in their GCSEs and A-levels this summer.

The Edexcel exam board's hi-tech approach, including electronic tagging of question papers, deterred cheating pupils last year.

As the exam season looms, the board is gearing up to introduce yet more gizmos worthy of James Bond's tech-savvy Q.

Schools' names will be invisibly written within single letters of exam papers using "microtext", effectively watermarking them to prove they are genuine because the microtext cannot be photocopied.

This would also allow exam papers to be traced back to schools in the event of a security breach.

In moves more reminiscent of the "transponders" attached to track key targets in the counter-terrorism drama 24, the bags in which exam papers are sent to schools will be fitted with radio tags.

Bosses will be able to scan exam papers remotely to make sure they have not been tampered with.

The board will continue to use sophisticated anti-plagiarism computer software to analyse pupils' written answers and detect whether they have copied each other's work, or if a whole class's answers are suspiciously similar.

source : hxxp://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2282363,00.html