Asklemmy

I was taking classes at a community college around I wanna say 2011 or 2012. Teachers didn't want you to use phones during class because they didn't want you to cheat or be distracted, but there was a big push from the administration to get students to buy digital copies of the textbooks (I assumed because physical copies can be sold used and that was eating into their profits). But reading the digital textbooks on your smartphone was in direct conflict with the no phone policy. So the workaround they found was to say, "phones are not allowed but tablets are ok and encouraged" (which is silly because a tablet can do anything a phone can do). To add confusion around this time phone manufacturers were exploring with making bigger and bigger screens, meanwhile tablets were exploring being more portable, so there was ambiguity in the distinction between the two both in function and physical dimensions. So how did they determine what devices were allowed and which ones were banned you ask? They landed on an arbitrary dimension of 7 inches. Anything smaller than 7 inches was a phone and was clearly being used to cheat, anything larger was a tablet and was an instructional tool. Teachers were given rulers to measure devices and if you were caught using a device smaller than 7 inches you would be disciplined for academic dishonesty. Mind you we also had laptops that also were not viewed as an issue, the school had free WiFi everywhere on campus, and we had apps like fb messnger for messaging and Skype and google voice for phone calls and also access to just Google, so there really was no distinction in mechanisms for academic dishonesty or for distractions between the two.