Colleges Are Turning Students' Phones Into Surveillance Machines, Tracking the Locations of Hundreds of Thousands (washingtonpost.com) 148
Colleges are tracking students' location to enforce attendance, analyze their behavior and assess their mental health. One company calculates a student's "risk score" based on factors such as whether she is going to the library enough. Washington Post reports: When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin's Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their "attendance points." And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they've been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full. "They want those points," he said. "They know I'm watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change." Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students' academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.
But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not. "We're adults. Do we really need to be tracked?" said Robby Pfeifer, a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the campus' WiFi network. "Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? ... And is it just going to keep progressing until we're micromanaged every second of the day?" This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people's activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize. The Washington Post includes mention of a Slashdot comment from a user who worries whether anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far. "Graduates will be well prepared ... to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems," the Slashdot commenter said. "Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984."
But some professors and education advocates argue that the systems represent a new low in intrusive technology, breaching students' privacy on a massive scale. The tracking systems, they worry, will infantilize students in the very place where they're expected to grow into adults, further training them to see surveillance as a normal part of living, whether they like it or not. "We're adults. Do we really need to be tracked?" said Robby Pfeifer, a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, which recently began logging the attendance of students connected to the campus' WiFi network. "Why is this necessary? How does this benefit us? ... And is it just going to keep progressing until we're micromanaged every second of the day?" This style of surveillance has become just another fact of life for many Americans. A flood of cameras, sensors and microphones, wired to an online backbone, now can measure people's activity and whereabouts with striking precision, reducing the mess of everyday living into trend lines that companies promise to help optimize. The Washington Post includes mention of a Slashdot comment from a user who worries whether anyone will truly know when all this surveillance has gone too far. "Graduates will be well prepared ... to embrace 24/7 government tracking and social credit systems," the Slashdot commenter said. "Building technology was a lot more fun before it went all 1984."
Silly Syracuse Students (Score:5, Insightful)
If this was done at Cornell, Harvard, Yale or Princeton.... we would just have friends take out phones and devices to class with them. I always attend, so I would carry all my friends stuff in my backpack... and then we ALL get bonus points, while I sleep through the boring lecture. What a stupid system that could be tricked so easily.... Only in Syracuse would students fall for this. And that's just phase I. When I don't want to be tracked I just leave my devices home. Why does everyone think there is any privacy at all (without innovation) and who would fall for this silly scheme! Anyway all one needs to do is read a few lines of the textbooks and get A+s on the exams and them skip the lecture anyway.
Re:Silly Syracuse Students (Score:5, Insightful)
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What is that, a liberal arts solution? Much better to make a device that spoofs the Bluetooth address and just transmits everybody's.
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Or clone the professor's and transmit it in the girls' locker room.
Re:Silly Syracuse Students (Score:4, Insightful)
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I agree to a point that faculty aren't the problem -- but only to a point. I have an appointment at the University of Nebraska and I'm speaking from my experience at this institution. I'm not aware of this technology being installed here, and I hope it never happens.
In another comment, I mentioned about how iClickers and how they can be used to enforce attendance with some rather draconian measures. Many instructors use a different system called TopHat to enforce attendance. There are many similarities
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Isn't TopHat easily hackable? Just have a friend send you the code and you enter it on your device (connected to the 4G network, not campus WiFi, so it doesn't know you're off-campus).
As far as MyPlan, why do all students need saving? If a student is unable or unwilling to learn the material, they should be weeded out and encouraged to pursue a different course of study. That's the way it works in many universities in Europe ... go to medical school in France, and the first two years are a "weeder" curri
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While I agree that nobody is entitled to a degree, administrators are generally very concerned with student retention rates. One of the reasons for this is that funding and accreditation is increasingly being linked with retention and graduation rates. Taken to the extreme, maximizing retention rates would effectively turn schools into degree mills. In this case, the role of the advisor or the first year experience is to reach out to the student and try to find out if there's an issue with study habits,
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And that's the problem. Funding shouldn't be tied to everyone's success -- that encourages lowered standards and intrusion upon students' private lives. It also encourages schools to be more selective about admissions in the first place (admitting students deemed more likely to graduate), rather than giving everyone a chance to sink or swim. Far better to give many students a chance at an education and let them go about it in their own way, even if 50% don't finish.
As far as intervention, wouldn't an ac
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College/University isnt a place where you have to be there for every lecture. The students just went through that from K to 12.
Students need to become more than infants. If they blow off too many lectures, then they either wont pass the course or will have found another way to get the information necessary on their own. Finding another way is exactly whats expected of them, isnt it? It no longer matters where you learned it.. it only matte
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The professors are generally the good guys/girls here ... they're interested in teaching the class, not infantilizing their students
Then why the fuck are they measuring attendance in the first place?
They should measure whether their students learn, not whether they get from room A to room B. They're explicitly infantilising their students, and doing so because of their own insecurity.
"Where were you?"
"I was in your lecture. I switched my phone off before entering so that it wouldn't distract me from your lecture."
Yeah, how about this authoritarian cunt gets censured for invading the privacy of his students.
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The professors are generally the good guys/girls here
I strongly disagree. They are teaching people who are supposed to be adults. Trying to force behaviors, such as attendance, is unapologetically (why is that not a word according to Firefox?) negative in that context. Adults can not be forced to avoid negative consequences (missing out on classes can make passing the tests more difficult) without taking a toll on their advancements in being an adult. You are effectively trading short term positive results for long term negative results by forcing attendance.
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MOST professors couldn't care less if you attend, though. They're happy when you do, but they're also smart enough to know that if you don't care about the subject matter, they can't force you to.
These kinds of things are pushed on them by higher-ups.
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There is no "if". The tracking of portable devices is a built-in practice at many if not major universities. by logging of mac addresses and by portable applications which log location. Portable device authentication and tracking is also being, tied to "multi-factor authentication" where people are expected to have both their personal password and a physical device to access company resources: this will defeat most phone swapping. And let us admit that very few modern students would _dare_ to swap their pho
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It takes time, and money, to purchase and use burner phones. The difficulty is not insurmountable: but there _is_ a difficulty.
Re:Silly Syracuse Students (Score:5, Interesting)
Attendance points are stupid... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Attendance points are stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a CS prof once who told us he didn't give a crap whether we came to class or not. We were adults and we could decide whether we knew the material sufficiently well or whether we needed to attend.
I judged all classes for the rest of my undergrad and grad career by that standard. Any class that took attendance was almost certainly going to be crap.
Re:Attendance points are stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
> Any class that took attendance was almost certainly going to be crap.
^ THIS.
There was no way in hell I was going to attend class with a shitty professor. I'm basically paying for the privilege to take the tests. I don't need mommy / daddy teacher trying to micro-manage my life.
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Why the heck would you spend that much money for the privilege of taking the tests when you could spend 87 bucks to take a CLEP test instead? :-)
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To be fair, you usually can't use it for any of your major courses, either. But the assumption is that you aren't bored out of your mind with our major courses, and if you are, it probably means you're picking the wrong major, so.... :-)
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Silly assumption. I switched majors in my third year from honors comp sci to telecommunications and networking, and was required to take intro to programming (in VB) despite knowing dozens of languages such as MIPS assembly, having studied algorithms for a few semesters, etc. The admins wouldn’t let me out of it, no matter the overwhelming evidence that I didn’t need it.
And, lucky me, the prof scored ten percent of my grade on attendance.
But it turned out that he was a good guy, and when I expla
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The only class in grad school that took attendance was a seminar course everyone in electrical engineering was required to take every semester. It was massive, of course, and consisted of students giving 5 min presentations. Naturally everyone used their 5 min to talk about their research, with no background, which meant about four people in the room could understand it.
They started by passing around a sign in sheet. But there was so much cheating they started having a sign in sheet at the beginnings and a
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We might have passed around a flask or two. And played some Doom.
Re:Attendance points are stupid... (Score:5, Interesting)
I do the same. (I am just an external lecturer though.) Where I teach, I can decide whether and when I require attendance. I tell the students attendance is only mandatory for exams and I give them the slides on the evening before the lecture. Creating attendance is _my_ job by making attendance worthwhile and convincing students of that. Forced attendance or handing out better grades for attendance teaches conformity and obedience, not any subject. And it makes the person giving the lecture _lazy_.
Of course, I have an advantage. I like the stuff I am teaching and I have quite a few stories to illustrate elements of the lecture. Hence I typically have about 90% present and I know for a fact that some non-attendance is because some students already know some of the material. It would be the height of stupidity to to require them to attend these lectures.
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Attendance can be useful to demonstrate that poor students have not been attending class, to have a written trail when their mommy or daddy protests. It's also quite embarrassing when the students in a class have not paid the university for that course, or are being paid to attend and write the papers and take tests for a failing but wealthy student. I admit that I was offered such money a few times in my college career:
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Nonsense. In my university classes, attendance and homework wasn't mandatory. The only t
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After high school, college and university assume you're an adult, and treat you as such. If you can't make it to class, you're expected to figure out a way to get the notes or or information you missed. You're expected to do the homework on your own knowing if you don't, you won't do well (students usually find out after the first semester).
I would go so far as saying that any university has an obligation to make sure anybody that graduates _is_ an adult and to fail the others. It is part of what an BA/MA/PhD must certify. (The other part is that you are able to red and write...)
If Mom or Dad come around asking why their kid failed, well, there's the marked assignments, midterms and finals that provide the justification for the mark.
Sure, you're still a student, but you're expected to behave as an adult. Attend, don't attend, no one cares because it doesn't affect anyone other than you. The professor is free to kick you out if you're disrupting the class.
That part I do not get. Parents have zero rights to even know the grades of their adult children here (Europe) and I certainly would not justify anything to them. This is subject to privacy laws. Fortunately, the situation has never arisen so far.
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Most of my profs didn't give a flying fuck about attendance. If you wanted to come, great. Otherwise, good luck come homework, labs, and exams. They didn't have to do the flunking, the exams did the work for them.
The classes that took attendance were mainly "weed-out" classes to thin the ranks.
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Odd, my experience was different. The weed out courses were the ones that didn't care if you attended. Formal logic was the classic.
The attendance taking ones were the bird courses. Ethics, for example.
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We were adults and we could decide whether we knew the material sufficiently well or whether we needed to attend.
Being an adult doesn't mean you have the proper perspective or judgement on determining your skill level in something you are learning.
I agree with the statement - college professors are not there to babysit - but the caveat of not knowing how much you don't understand should be included.
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They should be assigning points for participation.
Another alternative is to assign grades based on how well the students learn the subject matter.
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To be fair, and depending on exactly how you define gender, I could make a case for it being a multi-dimensional gradient surface. Of course there are some dense spots where most samples will show up...
OTOH, I'm having trouble coming up with a useful definition of gender that one can show doesn't exist.
OTTH, gender is usually linguistic rather than biological. And doesn't seem to have much to do with the history of any sciences except those related to grammar. The word usually used for biological differe
Participation for feedback, not points (Score:2)
Re: Attendance points are stupid... (Score:2)
Good and bad (Score:3)
This is good for individual students to be aware of-- where they stand in comparison to the other students [in terms of attendance] and how that likely will place their standing at the end of the semester.
However, it's not a good trend in general. Attendance at lecture should never be mandatory since sometimes the time can be better used otherwise (have you ever taken classes where the lectures are a waste of your time? I've had too many of those...), and data about a student's location on campus over time shouldn't be visible to anyone but themselves.
Too bad it will never be implemented in a way that only helps the students and doesn't abuse their privacy. This may help accelerate the transition to mostly online classes.
Side note: I went to SU. I'm glad it was years ago rather than now.
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Schools are paid based on the students attending class, especially at the grade school or high school level. Evidence that the children attended class is vital to the school's funding. And failure to attend class is a very good sign that a student is failing or about to fail.
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it saved a lot of time to create a hash (dictionary) containing arrays, rather than an array containing dictionaries.
Yes, because you now have one fucking hash, instead of an array of them.
Sorry but if you're going to interchange two disparate data structures then at least understand the differences between them.
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Where is lecture attendance mandatory? That's a novel concept to me.
Professors are generally given a great deal of freedom in how they grade. I had one that made attendance part of the grade. He would waste 5 minutes of the 50-minute class taking a rollcall. His lectures were terrible.
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Hey can u take my phone to class with you? (Score:2)
I am very grateful... (Score:5, Insightful)
... that I went to college in the 70's (grad school in the 80's). This is nonsensical yet creepy at the same time. If I wanted this crap, I'd move to China and work on my Social Credit Score.
Welcome to the Panopticon. This is getting way out of hand...
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I don't know how common this is in the only schools worth going to:
(1) Top tier schools
(2) Public universities
In (1), most students actually want to be there, so no need to enforce attendance. In (2), there isn't really funding or the level of top-down organization to use those systems in a widespread manner.
If you really want to enforce attendance ... (Score:3)
Get a burner phone. (Score:2)
why bother (Score:5, Insightful)
the students paid for the courses whether they paid directly or indirectly. In the end it is the students decision whether or not to attend classes . They know the consequences. as far as measuring mental health, having algorithms based on phone usage to measure ones mental health is just plain wrong. It could be used against the student for the rest of their lives.
No need to enforce attendance in this manner (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar to the system described in this story, there are iClicker remotes that require a physical presence in the room. And there's an iClicker app, which can use the GPS on students' phones to require they be near the classroom in order to be present. Clickers are really useful for active learning, asking students to discuss questions in small groups and then vote. It's also a really good way for instructors to know in real-time if students are understanding the lecture.
Unfortunately, they are often used as a cheap way just to enforce attendance. As an instructor, I don't require students to check in, and I warn students about the privacy implications. While I want my students to attend class, I despise this approach.
I prefer the approach of having in-class exercises, which students do in a group. Sometimes the exercises require students to look up data online and solve a couple of problems in class. Other times, I'll provide the data in my slides or in handouts. The TAs and I walk around and talk to the students while they're working on the problems.
The questions mimic what they get on the homework. For that matter, I reuse in-class exercises on exams, with the exact same questions and data. The students submit their assignment to Canvas as a group, and I give credit for participation. I also have students vote on the questions with their clickers once the TAs and I are done going around the room. I do this once the in-class exercise is done, to discuss the answer with the entire class.
The participation points are a very significant part of the students' grades. In the most recent class I taught, in-class participation was worth 25-30% of the final grade. Because the questions are very similar to the homework problems and can also appear on exams, anyone who skips class is at a big disadvantage.
This does effectively mandate attendance. But it respects the privacy of the students. It also promotes active learning. Students tend to get a lot more out of these types of lectures than just passively watching the instructor talk about slides. Even if the instructor may not be able to get to a lot of the room for very large lecture classes, the general approach can scale up to classes of that size.
There's no need to adopt the draconian measures of tracking students' with their phones. If you have to track students in that manner to get students to attend class, you're doing something very wrong as an instructor.
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Clickers are beloved of certain pedagogical theory adherents. They seem to me like a crutch for crappy teachers and/or too large lectures.
I once gave an invited lecture in a state of the art theatre. The organizers told me everyone who spoke in that theatre had to have at least one clicker question. So after the usual hoo haw about passing them out, dead batteries, people figuring out how to us
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iClickers Expensive (Score:3)
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I agree the cost of iClickers is egregious, and I'd really like to move away from them. I've heard of an open source app called Qlicker [github.io], which seems to have much of the same functionality as iClicker. I don't teach every semester because my appointment is primarily research-based. I did recently ask about teaching again in the fall of 2020 and/or spring of 2021, and indicated that I wanted to find an alternative to iClickers because of the expense. It looks like Google Forms is an easier alternative to
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Really interesting, all the reasons you give for why students should show up to your class. One conspicuously missing reason: The material is fascinating and important for anyone who wants to be literate in the field, and it's presented in a way that's designed to infect students with enthusiasm for the content.
I always told my students that I don't take attendance for the same reason that movie theaters don't take attendance: If you bought a ticket but you don't go to the movie, would it make sense for the
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I completely agree that the lecture needs to be relevant and presented with enthusiasm. This should be a given for any lecture. Due to the nature of my appointment, I tend to teach a lot of large classes with mostly non-majors. Many of them are going into a very different field, but the material still needs to be relevant. I'm a meteorologist, by the way.
Rather than simply teach theory and ideas, I try to spend more time applying the theory to current or recent weather. The site weather.cod.edu [cod.edu] has a w
A lecturer's perspective (Score:2)
Spotter.EDU pig-bacon... (Score:2)
This is a picture of a Spotter.EDU bacon ... I mean beacon. Students should of course feel free to paint such devices with conductive paint to form a Faraday cage, zap them with Tesla coils, steal them and turn them into experimental art projects, etc...
https://snworksceo.imgix.net/d... [imgix.net]
Roll Call Automation (Score:2)
Roll Calls used to take of valuable minutes of time, and it wasn't not uncommon for "Where were you?" calls to be made. (When I was in Syracuse I never missed anything without sending an e-mail first!)
Only thing is, the Hall of Languages wasn't designed to tolerate WiFi or cellular radiation... any time those things started to work, there was a fire. So, is that building still there?
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The US govt requires it, sorta (Score:5, Informative)
By the time I left there ~2 years later, all the instructors gave the same speech also, but it was different: "The government requires that we take attendance now, since people on grants must be counted to make sure they're showing up. And the college doesn't want to discriminate against people for being on grants. So now regular attendance is required of everybody even if you don't need to hear everything."
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Which is nonsense. They can take attendance, then invisibly to the student body discard attendance figures for non-grant students.
It's not the colleges ... (Score:2)
... it's the students.
Let those who are oppressed throw tea in a fucking harbour, or comply with authority.
It's their choice.
smartphone? (Score:3)
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Attendance needed, but also a better solution (Score:2)
As as student, I personally disliked anything that was a direct, genuine assessment of my abilities with regard to the material. My ideal course would be one that was 100% a final exam, giving me complete flexibility on how I managed my time and method of study for the entire rest of the semester.
As an instructor, I learned it was much more complicated to create a suitable curriculum. One reality is that many students are balancing not just school, but many extra program and even full time jobs and raising
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Yeah, but does it matter?
If a student doesn't want to be there and isn't interested in the material, why force them to succeed? Wouldn't it be a better outcome if they failed out and chose a different path in life?
What about an approach which encourages study while not strictly enforcing attendance? Give three exams + a final, make the score the best 2/3 plus the final grade. The first exam will act as a "warning shot" to students who aren't studying that they need to buckle down and get with it.
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Re:easily preventable big brother bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
I must agree. This is just training people up to be under constant surveillance. This is not compatible with freedom or democracy. Just say no.
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It is also not compatible with being an adult human.
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Fuck this Shit (Score:3)
I worked 30 hours a week and took 16+ units a semester when I went to college. That does not at all make me a hero in the least but who the hell is a professor to tell my how to budget my time? Honestly, I did skip a few classes to do some really fun stuff, other days I skipped some classes just to sleep. Meanwhile I graduated with honors.
College students are grown ass adults, treating them like children will only stunt them. Meanwhile, they are still young and they should be able to go be young without "the man" watching their every move.
No evidence (Score:2)
Unless the student data gathering & analysis has changed dramatically in the last couple of years, there's no evidence that this kind of surveillance provides any useful, actionable information about "at risk" students. So far attempts to detect, monitor, & help students who may be at risk of failure have made no difference to student retention or graduation rates.
On the other hand, making students feel like their constantly being watched all the time by persons unknown to keep them in line is a sin
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I love this idea! (Score:2)
So when are they going to release the report showing how many two hour lunches the administrators are having?
BTW, surprised no one has mentioned the movie Real Genius yet.
ttps://youtu.be/wB1X4o-MV6o
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Sorry, URL was truncated...
https://youtu.be/wB1X4o-MV6o [youtu.be]
Why not just take attendance? Oh... that's why. (Score:2)
Once in a while, in college or grad school, I had teachers who required attendance/participation at lectures and made it part of the grade. I don't recall needing any intrusive technology; they just took attendance each time. Why not do something like that?
Oh... it's because you have 340 fucking people in your lecture hall, and you don't know most of your students either by face or by name.
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Don't have a smartphone (Score:2)
Why attend class? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can take a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Ass in seat means nothing. That's why you have exams.
Personally I would rather be in a class with people who want to be there and who engage in the lesson then with a class filled with people who don't want to be there and are just fucking around.
If your class has low attendance because everything you teach can be taught by watching a youtube video maybe the problem is the professor, not the student.
What? (Score:2)
enforce attendance
One of the advantages of dealing with adults is if they don't want to go to class because they feel like throwing their tuition away then they will reap the grades they deserve. Actions have consequences. Why would an institute of higher education feel the need to enforce attendance?
my company is doing this (Score:2)
Starting January 2020 my company is putting in these bluetooth beacons all over the home office building. They already put up cameras everywhere.
People realize that 1984 is a NOVEL not a HOW-TO manual right?
WTH? (Score:2)
When did slashdot stop giving submitter's credit for the stories they submitted successfully?
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Fifteen phones in your bag? That's a too much radiation problem.
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