What's the non-inept way to stop cheating on the test? They can't ask the applicant to walk into their neighborhood Faraday cage.

Not administer it in the first place.

Paid homework projects are far superior. Plagiarism checks can be run on the provided solutions, and a follow-up conversation concerning the project at the interview should easily suss out anyone who had a third party to do it for them.

That approach also has the advantage of actually being a relevant to the position—unlike some generalized intelligence test.

Frankly if people are putting up with the test they have now, Amazon could probably get away with issuing unpaid homework projects, however classless that would be.

> conversation [...] should easily suss out anyone who had a third party to do it for them

This will lead to hiring people who can be coached until they sort of understand a solution, although they still couldn't create it.

> This will lead to hiring people who [...]

Every non-perfect solution is worthless?

I've found that the answer to all this is to give a 30-60m remote test (no proctoring), where they get to write the thing as they want, and a 15m discussion where you analyze their solution and assign one new feature then let them walk you through the changes. No code, no whiteboard, just discussion.

A lot of people can't whiteboard code from scratch but can take a piece of code they've just written and discuss next steps. And it's also an actual work skill that many good coders are bad at, so it gives you a good insight into high and low-level people.