Regular watches can blame smartwatches for being lumped into this.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Japan's Kyoto University says it will ban students from wearing or using any type of watch during entrance exams, beginning next year, to prohibit possible cheating.
The University's thought process behind this impending rule is simple. The surge of smartwatches in a variety of styles has made it tough to decipher whether students are using their timepieces to communicate, so the only way to make sure there's no cheating via timepieces is to eliminate them all.
Smartwatches, in particular, can be used to calculate figures and then share it with friends. An official with Kyoto University says this ban "is required in order to conduct a fair test."
While the Wall Street Journal points out that other colleges around the world — like Australia's University of New South Wales — have installed similar bans on students wearing watches in exam rooms, Kyoto University is believed to be the first to do so in Japan.
The old excuse of "looking up the time" won't fly either, as students can refer to the wall clocks hanging up in each exam room in Kyoto University, instead.
Kyoto, in particular, wants to be extra careful after surviving a cheating scandal just four years ago in 2011. That scandal involved a student using a cell phone during an entrance exam and posting questions from the test onto an Internet board, according to the Journal. It ended with a 19-year-old student reportedly being arrested.
With this rule being put into effect to begin the New Year, it will be intriguing to see if colleges in the United States follow suit and take preventative action to ban watches of all kinds from being worn and used during exams, as well.
