today i had taken the UKVI English exam in a setting that i can only describe as "a SCIF"

can someone explain to me why academia in 2026 acts like the little sister of an intelligence agency

i thought the Life in the UK test had an absurd degree of security measures, but (aside from a metal detector being not used) the Pearson PTE test was done in an even more obsessive manner

@whitequark Cheating. Apparently it's pretty bad.

@whitequark because it quite literally is now and has been for a while
like, if you are going to take a exam or get a degree for something, you are going to be under multiple forms of surveillance at all times even after you get your qualification
it's to deal with cheating and all the other stuff they're strict at
they're especially strict if it's in a field that may pose a national security risk or where qualifications that shouldn't of been issued have been

@chaos how the fuck are you going to cheat on an english test that gives you like 10 seconds to think anyway

@whitequark @chaos Hidden camera/earpiece?

@snowfox @chaos how are you going to use that?

@whitequark we're lucky to get a thought every 30 seconds lol

as someone who needs a scribe or computer for written exams, needs to be in a separate room, etc, getting all of that organised and all the paperwork done was a fucking nightmare

it took from middle school until somewhere around high school/utc/college to fully get all the accommodations we needed, and of course by then we was so burnt out from trying to do well without accommodations that our whole body started shutting down and we was very ill for years after finishing our BTEC (our immune system was never good but now it's so bad from all the stress dealing with education that we're frequently exceedingly ill with the common cold for an entire year like in 2025)

none of this promotes a healthy academic environment and is actively harmful towards disabled folk

@chaos yeah that all is entirely predictable

i have a sensory processing disorder that through a very extensive amount of work i tuned to the point where i can mostly normally participate in meetings and such. i got to give that capacity the biggest workout it's had for the last 5 fucking years today. i really should not have had to

@whitequark @chaos An accomplice giving you the answers!

I assume there's a market for immigration test cheating just as there would be for school/university/SATs/etc.

@snowfox @chaos you would not have either the ability or the time to make use of them, even if this accomplice had perfect information

@whitequark we're better at dealing with things now, but we never should of had to in the first place

if we got all the help we needed growing up then maybe we'd one day be capable of having a job but now, it's just no longer possible for this vessel to work due, so instead we're just having to live off benefits with fuck all for ourselves and rarely when we have the energy to we will volunteer at the library or at the food bank teaching low-spoons high nutrition cooking skills

@whitequark we have gone through 9 separate instances of burnout, 6 of them directly as a result of education, and of course when you're unable to recover then the negatives don't just stack but exponentially worsen

got that broken vessel syndrome

@chaos i'm in a funny position of "shouldn't be able to work by any stretch of measure, am more consistently productive than most of my peers anyway"

@whitequark we also fall into that occasionally, but only for short times with very very long rests and rarely for the same field of work

@whitequark wrote a preemptive multitasking posix kernel when we was 12 and now we're so burnt out even after recovering from it that we can only write a few lines of code for a project every week cause of the damage it did to our body

@chaos i have a systematic way of dealing with burnout that appears to elude most of the people i've talked to

@whitequark care to elaborate?

@chaos genuinely unsure if i can explain it in any useful way

@whitequark honestly the same for how we deal with burnout, trauma, therapy etc
spent years finding what worked best for us, we always know what to do for a given problem from years of fucking around and finding out
also helps being plural and able to do therapy with ourselves (and practicing since we was like, 10..)
we could explain the techniques sure, but how to utilise them depends Heavily on ones own personal experience and how their brain works
we're very good at teaching stuff like that once we've gotten to fully understand the internal and external vibes of someone, but just the knowledge on its own isn't very useful without building your own tooling for it

@whitequark we suppose it's probably similar for you?

@chaos yep

@whitequark dealing with burnout for us was the easy part, we just needed to move out so that we would be able to fix it

preventing it while it was still ongoing whilst not able to take a step back and rest? that's the hard part

but now that we are so in tune with all the signs, it's a lot easier for us to adapt and make changes to prevent it from becoming a worser problem

same for dealing with all the things wrong with our genetic abomination of a vessel that'd have a syndrome named after it in accredited medical publications if the nhs didn't keep loosing our whole genome sequencing results

sometimes we feel our entire personal experience is just a massive dynamic spreadsheet of what to do in a given situation, we spent a while figuring out all the values but now it's in place, it's a lot easier to deal with anything that happens while still allowing for fun and change

@whitequark angel girl behaviour

@chaos 100%

i had my WGS done privately, this has the benefit of not letting anybody else fuck up working with it (it's on Zenodo)

@whitequark we was considering getting it done privately but the process for finding places that do it and actually arranging it, along with the finances required, kinda makes it inaccessible to us, certainly would be able to (and it'd likely help out with our "too many symptoms to form a differential") but not without some assistance

wish we asked for a physical copy of our genome so that we could go through and analyse it ourselves back when they still had the data, but a ransomware attack lost the data and a decent portion of our medical records with it

@chaos someone once messaged me out of blue asking if i want to get sequenced on an Illumina NovaSeq someone needed to do a demonstration run on for basically cost of materials ($1700)

@chaos and i uploaded the raw reads to Zenodo exactly because i had no confidence in my ability to keep them available

@whitequark @snowfox @chaos I would also consider the following:

If someone has the resources to heavily cheat with such measures without balling on the greeting they prolly would do fine in UK, wouldn't they?

@whitequark that amount of money would still take a year after our savings recover (~8m from now) from the last year of bullshit, but certainly do able

other problem is getting nhs to then actually make use of the data, or getting it analysed and presented to them

if you could guide us through it (or point us to someone that could) at some point in the future, that'd be a lot of help

 

@chaos oh that was in 2017, sequencing is at least an order of magnitude cheaper now for the same quality

@chaos @whitequark

if you are going to take a exam or get a degree for something, you are going to be under multiple forms of surveillance at all times even after you get your qualification

what do you mean? what kind of surveillance? are you saying that exam boards (or schools/universities/governments/whoever else requires you to take tests) spy on you forever after you’ve passed an exam?

@ppxl @whitequark @chaos That's not what they're testing though, and I'm not a fan of argument that boil down to "it's okay if rich people cheat because they'll manage okay by being rich".

(By the time you apply for ILR, you've already been in the country for ~5 years and are doing decently enough to throw £3000+ at the Home Office; there's no need to test that!)

@snowfox @whitequark @chaos 3000 pounderonies? Damn, I guess it IS pay to win. But that's not the argument I only make BTW, but also the UK government. I just highlighted the inconsistency.