College Board Bans Wearing of Smart Glasses While Taking the SAT

College Board Bans Wearing of Smart Glasses While Taking the SAT

These glasses could easily be used to cheat, so this makes perfect sense.

Inside Higher Ed reports:

College Board Bans Smart Glasses During SAT

The College Board will prohibit students from wearing smart glasses—wearable, internet-connected computers that allow users to see a computer display in the lenses—while taking the SAT, starting in March 2026.

The organization has long banned any wearable electronics, such as Apple AirPods and Apple Watches, said Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president of college readiness assessments at the College Board. Such devices, as well as students’ phones, are taken away by the test’s proctor before the test begins; the rule outlawing smart glasses is just an extension of that existing policy.

Although the first smart glasses emerged in the early 2010s, the technology has risen to prominence in recent years, especially as companies such as Meta and Google have debuted artificial intelligence–enabled versions of the product. As they’ve become more common, professors have also raised alarm bells about whether they will be used for cheating; they fear that students will use them to scan tests and get fed the answers by AI in real time without detection.

At least one documented example exists of a student using smart glasses to cheat; a student in Tokyo was caught using his spectacles to post questions from a college entrance exam on the social media site X and received answers from other social media users.

An op-ed by professors at the University of Victoria in Canada also warned that the threat of smart glasses in the classroom goes beyond cheating. They also discussed them as a threat to academic freedom; the glasses could allow students to record their professors without their professors knowing they’re being filmed, allowing them to leak lectures or even create deepfakes, the professors said.

Outside of higher education, they have been criticized for violating people’s privacy as it has become increasingly common for social media content creators to secretly record their conversations with strangers via smart glasses and post those videos online.

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