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Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

266 points by mod50ack 7y ago

mod50ack 7y ago
I'm a college student myself (my university, as far as I'm aware, has no system such as this). As far as I'm concerned, it's both an insidious creep of social-credit policy and a gross invasion of student privacy. It treats us as children rather than as the adults we are, and seems to me to be a sign of the re-infantalization of colleges. Many generations ago, when the age of majority was for the most part higher, colleges acted in loco parentis for their minor undergraduates. It was during the twentieth century that college students came to be recognized as real adults. But now it seems that the coddling has in many ways increased, and some find it fit again, as one sees here, to surveil us like children. Further, while there have been obvious benefits of technological advancement, they have in large part erased informal procedures and social understanding in favor of a rigid and unforgiving process. For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. Whereas in the past the common practice of most professors would be along the lines of "get it in my mailbox by 4 p.m.", or something like that, but with the informal understanding that at 4:00:00.0...1, the door of the mailbox would not close and chop off your hand. And exceptions to rules were easier to get before the arbiter of the rules became a severe and unfeeling one.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  I don't think those informal understandings should stay so informal. If it's the fact that having your paper due by 4:20 is fine, then let it be 4:20, although the midnight deadline is likely something most people wouldn't do if they had to collect submissions in person, and so in this scenario we have automation possibly enabling more flexibility in student schedules. If students need extra room to pass the bar and it is a meaningful relaxation of rules, then let it be known so that the matter can be studied. Why? Because empathy at scale works in ways which breeds hostility among groups and it creates an unhealthy incentive to compete over a teacher; it's not really reasonable to expect people to be immune to race or class or sex. Further, if the rules are strict then people need to know rather than _some_ people getting the discretionary treatment and others not.
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion? Is it actually _better_, or does it just maximise specific metrics that you're able to easily quantify? More to the point - do you want to _be_ that person? I'm glad that my professors were human beings and not automatons - I probably wouldn't have done well otherwise (bureaucrats are not my idea of good role models).
    - Zenst 7y ago
      > Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion? You mean a tech companies support as many anecdote has attested over the years upon Ycombinator with cries of trying to just speak with a human and that sad trend that if you want tech-support with a human it can boil down to knowing somebody who knows somebody who works there who can humanise the issue. With that in mind, think we are already there alas. The aspect that you get emails from companies that are donotreply and to actually reply entails reading thru numerous fineprint to find an email that will automatically process you response. Yes the days of drive-by support are well are truly here.
    - threatofrain 7y ago
      We could speak the same way about police to make it obvious why some people don’t like the double edge of discretion. Isn’t it such a burden that police have to wear cameras? It’s probably much harder to exercise any executive discretion that way, let alone have any natural conversation, especially when people may demand lawsuits and firings over such footage. Must police be very equally kind to both white and black kids, like in some politically correct universe? Why then do some people demand cameras? Don’t they like the good old neighborhood discretion? Why is it so hard to feel for those who receive the shitty edge of discretion? Is it because the other side is so sweet? Another side of discretion is that some judges are harsher in sentencing before vs after lunch. But such a human interface...
      - 7y ago
- im3w1l 7y ago
  This never happened to me at any age. So maybe it's not about age. Maybe it's about generation.
- brian-armstrong 7y ago
  I think it's great. Western-style democracy is on its way out and we will probably see its end before our own deaths. It's good to start easing younger generations into an absolute surveillance so that the transition will be easier for them to accept later.
- knzhou 7y ago
  > For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cutoff, and any position of it will lead to complaints. Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff. If you have a good reason for an extension, you can still get it. But there's no reason anybody needs, specifically, the extra second after a formal deadline. If the deadline were moved to a second after midnight, you would try to submit two seconds after midnight and complain, and so on. (I mean, why do you think deadlines are at midnight in the first place? Because in-person collection would stop working at 5 PM, leading to complaints, so deadlines were extended to midnight to let people work at night.) This is pointless slippage, and the resolution from the student side is so easy. Just pretend every deadline is 5 minutes earlier than it actually is, and you'll never have problems.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    Slippage is never pointless but rather an important aspect for any efficient system. If you are setting the deadline at midnight instead of 4pm then you are making most of the students work longer on the assignment. Set the hard deadline to 4pm and then allow a few students to submit late. That ends up being less of a burden on students and society.
    - knzhou 7y ago
      That’s not any different. Now how late are you allowed to submit? 5 PM? Sometime at night? Midnight? How many people are allowed to submit late? What if word gets out that everybody is allowed to? You get the exact same problem, except that more of the professor and TA’s time is wasted, and the whole process now has favoritism baked in. I have seen deadlines wrap all the way around a 24 hour cycle in this way. 5 PM is bad because people want to work at night, so delay to midnight. Well, people aren’t finishing, so delay to 5 AM, since everybody would be asleep then. Well now people are blaming you for “forcing” them to do all nighters, so delay to 9 AM. Now people say that’s unreasonable, because submitting later in the workday wouldn’t hurt anyone. So delay to 5 PM.
- cvwright 7y ago
  The way it works in my courses is, there’s a hard deadline (usually 10pm) for getting full credit. Then for the next two hours (typically until midnight) you can still submit for 95% of the points. I often also allow even later submissions, but with increasing penalty up to 50%.
- UncleEntity 7y ago
  > Whereas in the past the common practice of most professors would be along the lines of "get it in my mailbox by 4 p.m."... I had professors who would give their home address so you could get your assignment turned in on the calendar day and not get docked for it being late -- distinctly remember having to drive to the next town over to do that once. Then again this was before the internets were all popular so they couldn't really expect the students to submit it by email.
- JadeNB 7y ago
  > Further, while there have been obvious benefits of technological advancement, they have in large part erased informal procedures and social understanding in favor of a rigid and unforgiving process. For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. Whereas in the past the common practice of most professors would be along the lines of "get it in my mailbox by 4 p.m.", or something like that, but with the informal understanding that at 4:00:00.0...1, the door of the mailbox would not close and chop off your hand. And exceptions to rules were easier to get before the arbiter of the rules became a severe and unfeeling one. Speaking as a professor, there are plenty of severe and unfeeling professors out there. Thinking both as a student and as a professor, I'd much rather have everyone subject to the same inflexible rules, rather than to have some students favoured and some disfavoured based on what will inevitably be a subjective opinion—I'll be likely, even if subconsciously, to favour a student who has made a positive impression over one who has made a negative impression (when it is likely the latter who needs more help to get back on an equal footing!), or a student who asks on a good day than one who asks on a bad.
- toomanybeersies 7y ago
  At least at my university, if you had a good excuse you could usually email your lecturer your late assignment. Missing the cutoff by a couple of minutes was generally considered a good excuse. My university was very reasonable though, they let me sit an exam 2 days late because I had to fly out for a job interview, they simply made me promise that I wouldn't ask my classmates about the exam. Funnily enough I actually ended up failing that paper anyway, but the opportunity was appreciated.
- cbsmith 7y ago
  I don't grok the insidious creep of social credit policy or the gross invasion of student privacy. You're attending a lecture at a college. You're not in a private location. Traditionally, what the beacons were doing would be done by TAs taking attendance, class participation grading, or simply by having trivial pop quizzes during class. Adding bluetooth beacons just makes the process more efficient (and makes it easier for students to fool the system), but it doesn't change its essential nature. Making lecture attendance a part of your grade may seem like bad policy or infantalizing to you, but that doesn't make it an invasion of privacy or social-credit policy. Your tangential advocacy about "social understanding" missing the negative consequences of that approach. In particular that inconsistency of rule application creates a hole you can drive a truck through for all kinds of unfair and biased consequences (literally exactly what is brought to the table by a "feeling" application of the rules), and with little gained. While thoughtful empathic responses can be very helpful in a lot of situations, I don't think you've made a good case for this one.
  - mod50ack 7y ago
    (relatively) fine for the class attendance (although I still don't feel comfortable with that kind of mechanism for doing it). But the article talks about interventions based on a constant monitoring under the guise of "caring about students' mental health". Now, I suppose I am glad their intentions are in the right place, but I would feel rather infantilized if anybody saw it fit to track me around the clock like that. It's true that unwritten social rules aren't 100% fair. They're not entirely consistent either. But the foremost one I was thinking about was the increased acceptance of human margin of error in accounting: humans, unlike computers, don't count down the the nanosecond. I've had assignments automatically marked as late because they only finished transferring over the network a second after the due time. A human would never say that's late. Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo. Thankfully in all those cases I've been manually marked not late. But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions.
    - cbsmith 7y ago
- seem_2211 7y ago
  I went to University that had a similar deadline system (sometimes midnight, sometimes midday, sometimes 3pm - all depended on the lecturer/tutor). If you had a truly extenuating circumstance, you could always speak to the lecturer via email or during their office hours. Some had more relaxed policies than others, while others had various penalties for being late. As far as I'm aware, the difference between 12:00:00 and 12:00:30 wasn't ever really a thing, as any reasonable system can expect a few minutes of delay owing to computer problems.
- anoncake 7y ago
  The real informal understanding IMHO was that rules should be there for a sensible reason. The reason for giving a 4pm deadline usually is that you want to grade the submissions sometime after 4pm. The reason for giving a midnight deadline is that it is a deadline and you've got to give deadlines.
hackworks 7y ago
Schools and colleges should ideally be a place for creativity, free thinkers and open by default. Using surveillance and improving attendance through fear tactics is not going to help. You will get their physical presence but not their involvement. I wonder how long it will take for students to start placing check Bluetooth devices in all places they are expected to be present and remotely switch them at desired times. I hope this happens and defeats this unethical forced surveillance by colleges. Alternatively, I would encourage student counselors spend a little more time with students and assist them to monitor themselves. Motivate the youngsters to better regulate themselves and grow up to be independent and responsible adults. Note: On Android, there is an app named Tasker. You can automate your phone with it. Schools could start maintaining shared Tasker profiles that can help students stick to some well defined and commonly followed routines. This is giving control back to the student and coaching them about the merits in planning and sticking to plans.
sebasmurphy 7y ago
Not sure if this is still the case or not but at Maryland circa. 2007-2010 it was school policy that no class could have attendance factored into the grade. If you wanted to skip every class and only show up for exams, that was your choice. Privacy implications aside, I feel that this should be the case everywhere since college is effectively a business transaction. What you decide to do with the product after you've paid should be entirely up to you.
- mnm1 7y ago
  Seriously. I was lowered an entire grade in one class for not attending despite my work being of the highest quality. Attendance was not even listed as part of the grade on the syllabus so I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time. Teachers that do that should be fired. As should teachers that lose your midterm. But I doubt anyone cares about the students and the impact things like this have on them. Then we wonder why people cheat at the highest levels of our society. Because our society and education system encourages them to cheat by showing students in the harshest way possible that the rules are stacked against them and the playing field is uneven. And I paid over $100k to have my work devalued while being treated like an infant.
  - astura 7y ago
    > I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time Ever heard of a pop quiz?
    - savolai 7y ago
      That’s not the kind of unexpected situation the comment you are replying to is referring to at all. If the rules are not set in advance, they are basically arbitrary.
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      Pop quizzes should be used to give the teacher information about what the students are actually understanding vs not understanding, not to actually determine a student's grade in a class.
sys_64738 7y ago
What's wrong with an attendance sheet?
- t34543 7y ago
  Why does attendance matter?
  - astura 7y ago
    That's where you learn the material? Beyond that most of my anthropology classes (I minored in anthropology) had class discussion as part of the grade. I even had one professor who had us move the desks into a big circle as we entered (and put them back as we were leaving) in order to better facilitate discussion. Also you'd have to be there to hand in previous assignments and get new assignments. Most of my classes (in all classes) had assignments due either every day or at least most days. You'd also have to be there to hear about changes in the schedule. If you only show up for tests and the day of the test changes you'd need to know. Plus pop quizzes. They aren't used much in college, but I think I had one or two.
    - blihp 7y ago
      Attendance is irrelevant to most of your points: 1) Some can learn the material without attending. If they don't learn it, their grade will reflect that. 2) If one is present but doesn't participate, how does taking attendance help reflect that? (This is just a lazy prof/TA as they really should be noting participation, rather than attendance, if it's relevant to grading for a course) 3) If your assignment(s) don't get handed in, they don't get handed in and your grade will reflect that. 4) If you don't attend and show up on the right day for tests etc, your grade will reflect that. 5) If you're not there for a pop quiz, your grade will reflect that. Taking attendance is a weak mechanism at best to address any of these issues. One of the things that college should be doing is preparing people for the real world where they won't have paid babysitters. Classes are proxies for meetings etc. where you may, or may not, show up but are responsible for the content covered either way. Taking attendance just reinforces the view that the students are still children.
hooloovoo_zoo 7y ago
How hard would it be to make a device that spoofs everyone's phone?
- DailyHN 7y ago
  Not hard. No dedicated device required, either. It requires reverse engineering which data in being transferred to the school. This likely occurs using a simple HTTP request. Or series of requests. Copy the data from that HTTP request. Then replicate those HTTP requests.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    That works only if the app authors have no basic idea of security
    - nokya 7y ago
      Good news: that's very likely the case for the system described in the article.
ryzvonusef 7y ago
""Several students said they didn’t mind a system designed to keep them honest. But one of them, a freshman athlete at Temple University who asked to speak anonymously to avoid team punishment, said the SpotterEDU app has become a nightmare, marking him absent when he’s sitting in class and marking him late when he’s on time. He said he squandered several of his early lectures trying to convince the app he was present, toggling his settings in desperation as professors needled him to put the phone away. He then had to defend himself to campus staff members, who believed the data more than him."" This is downside of tech, false positive and negatives Also, couldn't you just buy a cheap burner phone and hand it to a friend to take to class for you? Just because the phone is there doesn't mean the person is.
- wck0 7y ago
  That's likely a violation of the institution's academic honesty policy.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    I recall that Harvard employed the "honor system" which required each student to be truthful on all things academic but that it all assumed honor in the student - it had the assumption that the university would not engage in constant surveillance of the students. A policy of "we'll surveil you as much as technologically possible and we are allowed to harshly punish all evasions of this surveillance" is essentially a "dishonor" policy, indistinguishable from the policies that prisoners face.
  - ken 7y ago
    True, but it's a two-way street. An academic honesty policy seems predicated on the assumption that the system run by faculty is inherently honest. > [...] said the SpotterEDU app has become a nightmare, marking him absent when he’s sitting in class and marking him late when he’s on time. He said he squandered several of his early lectures trying to convince the app he was present, toggling his settings in desperation as professors needled him to put the phone away. He then had to defend himself to campus staff members, who believed the data more than him. I pride myself on my honesty, but even I would have a hard time feeling bad about cheating this system.
x100100 7y ago
Disgusting that an IT "professor" forces students to install spyware on their own hardware. Students should unite and collectively uninstall the malware.
- sverige 7y ago
  Now, now, don't get too frisky there or these same people might get the idea to uninstall the spyware put on their phones by the manufacturer, the carrier, the OS provider, and the app devs. Then where would we end up? [/s]
montjoy 7y ago
This is so ripe for abuse. I would not want my daughter going to a school that implemented such a program.
esotericn 7y ago
Weird. My university didn't care if you attended lectures. Why would they? It's not a prison camp. More focused tutorials with 1 on 2 or 1 on 4, sure. Not everything needs to 'scale'.
- _vertigo 7y ago
  In my experience it varied from professor to professor. Many professors would notice when you don't attend lecture, which I found to be impressive given the size of some of the classes. I found that some professors were more likely to be lenient or accommodating if they recognized you as a frequent and engaged attender, or if you went to office hours or asked insightful questions during lecture. On the other hand, there were classes I didn't attend very often at all, and I remember a couple of times being stumped on the homework and going to office hours to gain some traction only to be gently ribbed for not going to lecture. You get the sense that many professors do pay attention to that kind of thing and it does factor in, if only unconsciously.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dpflan 7y ago
> “We’re reinforcing this sense of powerlessness … when we could be asking harder questions, like: Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?” This is a great rebuttal. The tracking app of focus, SpotterEDU, was made to target student athletes and reduce truancy. But the founder has an odd history and this just smells of a money grab under the guise of helping students. The professors who lay laurels on the application because attendance is up need to assess performance of their classrooms with the app and those from the past without it to really make a statement.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  In the early 80s at several large universities I knew of, it wasn't uncommon for attendance at lectures to be effectively optional. The student was expected to do the homework, pass the midterm and final and maybe participate in discussions in a small section with a TA or graduate student. This varied from class to class, of course. Still, this was an incentive for a given professor to make their lecture interesting and useful enough that students wanted to attend.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  This reminds me of when I was at university 20 years ago.... I had a friend who was paid to follow a basketball player to class and make sure he went. The player didn't even know he was being followed, my friend reported his info directly to the athletic department. Always stuck out to me as an example of how ridiculous college sports are. I guess now they have just automated that job.
- QuesnayJr 7y ago
  The app sounds like a dystopian nightmare, but this rebuttal is equally bad. Students are adults. If they don't want to show up, then they can not show up. If they can't muster the internal motivation to go to college and do the work, then that's on them.
edflsafoiewq 7y ago
What happens if you don't own a smart phone?
- kart23 7y ago
  You probably just don't get those attendance points?
  - drdeadringer 7y ago
    ... and then your grades suffer because you don't have a smartphone? Or what am I missing?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
2stop 7y ago
So... Turn off Bluetooth/wifi... Attend. Take a selfie. Proof of false negative. Never show up again. This is very easily solvable without outrage.
drewg123 7y ago
I find it telling that they are afraid of letting students know what their bluetooth receivers look like. I know that if I was in still school and being tracked like this, I'd ether vandalize or come up with a way to jam those receivers..
- jahmed 7y ago
  I think you answered your own question and I'd be right there with you.
whatsmyusername 7y ago
Yeah that's incredibly creepy.
motohagiography 7y ago
Real question is, what are we educating people to be?
- savolai 7y ago
  This, so much. I was a developer in the Moodle community once. I was several times puzzled by how deep the interest of teachers was to just get to control students, regardless of whether it seemed to serve any apparent learning goal/purpose.
- ikeyany 7y ago
  Compliant, and then time permitting, students.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed An appropriate dream for a college administrator. But a travesty for creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists. I’d be curious. Would these same administrators object to their timeliness being similarly measured? Quantified coffee-break time theft, for example, could be deducted from pay cheques.
- isthis1984 7y ago
  I've observed there are a class of people that desire to keep everyone else under control. There seems to be no other reason than it makes them feel better, the fact that some people are not under control makes them feel uneasy. These people seem to be inserting themselves everywhere, IT is a bonanza for these people. Anyone know any psychology researching this? It's something that's been irritating me more and more since I've noticed it.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    It's called authoritarianism.
    - isthis1984 7y ago
      Thanks, @droithomme's comment put me onto that to, I didn't realise it was classed as a personality type not just a form of government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personalit... this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. The book is here https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-Adorno/dp/1788731646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+authoritarian+personality&qid=1577312193&sr=8-1 https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-A... the comments are an interesting study alone.
      - marcoperaza 7y ago
WalterBright 7y ago
> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and enjoying being treated as an adult for the first time in my life. Nobody was telling me to go to class, admonishing me for not going, giving me credit for attendance or docking me for not. The freshman EE class professor was famous (infamous?) for scheduling his lectures at 8AM, because he only wanted the interested students showing up at them.
- grawprog 7y ago
  My school was the same. The teachers told us straight up, they didn't care if we showed up or not, we were paying to be there, the teachers got paid the same whether we showed up or not and in the end, if we chose not to show up for a lecture, there's a good chance we wouldn't know the material well enough to pass the tests on it anyway, so our grades just always reflected our own efforts. I remember missing one stats lecture, for a good reason, and being nearly completely screwed over for a bit after that. I ended up having to teach myself the stuff I missed just to stay caught up.
- ellius 7y ago
  I attended a private high school that gave us a remarkable degree of freedom at a young age. We were allowed to drive off campus as upper classmen, choose a wide range of electives, and generally were treated as the near-adults we were. Recently I read that my high school is instituting a random drug testing policy. I wrote a letter (that I'm sure they promptly ignored) saying how the thing I most remember about my high school experience is that I was trusted with a high degree of autonomy, and in return I was expected to act responsibly and to think about issues with a seriousness not often expected of teenagers in our society. It seems like more and more these infantilizing policies are becoming a norm in our society. Instead of trusting human beings and granting them personal autonomy and responsibility, we act like imposing ever-greater layers of rules and controls will produce good citizens. Frankly I think this is a disastrous approach and is creating entitled, helpless, and childish adults. It's a massive disservice to ourselves and our society. I'll never forget my first day of college. Lots of the other kids in my dorm were running around like crazy people. You could tell they'd never really been free to be themselves and run their own affairs. I felt very different. While it was a significant change to be totally on my own, it felt like a natural extension of the freedom I had slowly been granted over the previous two or three years. I was ready to deal with it. I didn't do everything perfectly, and I could have made better decisions, but by and large I felt like the transition to adulthood was comfortable and natural. The more we impose these command-and-control models, the more I fear we are robbing our children of that same feeling and casting them into adulthood with poorer tools than we were given.
droithomme 7y ago
no paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/colleges-are-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-machines-tracking-the-locations-of-hundreds-of-thousands/ar-BBYiX9M https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/colleges-are-turning-stude...
WalterBright 7y ago
> the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day. I already turned off the bluetooth on my phone. I guess I should turn off the wifi when I'm not home, too.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  Unless they are doing deep packet inspection or analyzing your browser through a wifi login portal, I think an iPhone's MAC randomization should be able to defeat WiFi-based tracking (barring WiFi-as-radar, those are much more difficult to evade, there is a ton of metadata you can collect from stuff like breathing, gait and heart rate etc. Cross reference with CCTV to prevent false positives.).
  - novok 7y ago
    If you are 'logged in' into a wifi network, then MAC address randomization is turned off for that network and the iPhone gives the real MAC address of the device. It's only used in non connected scenarios such as scanning for available networks. Another bad thing is how iBeacon bluetooth is something you can't turn off specifically on an iPhone if you have bluetooth on in any capacity. And there is no per app privacy permission to turn off ibeacon processing. It's a huge privacy violation and I always wonder why it's not brought up that much.
    - sansnomme 7y ago
      Oh that's terrible, I also thought the randomization is constantly on. Is this the case for Android and the desktop operating systems too? Windows, OS X, Ubuntu etc.?
      - jldugger 7y ago
        Your connection with the AP is bound to a particular MAC. You could randomize it per AP, but you can't like, randomize the MAC for every packet.
clubm8 7y ago
The problem is many classes don't require attendance, especially the sort obsessed with making sure athletes are present as mentioned. This is about forcing compliance. The REAL issue is people unprepared for college come, do not attend lectures, fail out, and complain. Conversely, students who understand that a class is rote memorization and put in the memorization at a time of their choosing after reviewing the powerpoint are penalized if they have physical/mental/social issues that sometimes prevent them from being attentive at a specific time in a specific place. If instructors want to complain about grade grubbing and cheating, they need to focus on teaching, not measuring compliance.
vector_spaces 7y ago
I'm 32 years old, going back to school part time to finish up my degree. I'm paying tuition fully out of pocket. Thankfully my school doesn't seem to be doing this yet, but if they did, there's absolutely no way I would tolerate them surveilling me and treating me like a child like this I'm paying them, so if I choose to skip class that's on me. And thanks but no thanks for trying to assess my mental health -- I already pay people who are actually qualified to do that for me. Also, why is it that in articles like this they can always find someone willing to say "this isn't invasive, I have nothing to hide"? Christ.
- bitwize 7y ago
  It's not so bad: https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-02-27 https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-02-27
mentos 7y ago
Why are kids paying for school if they’re not going to class?
- banads 7y ago
  To get a degree -> to get a job. For me personally, there were many classes that I could easily pass without needing to go to class
- aratakareigen 7y ago
  I stay at home and read the lecture slides on my computer because it's easier for me, and lets me be nocturnal. Am I really missing out on that much by not being there?
  - N3cr0ph4g1st 7y ago
    Depends on your style and the class. In undergrad I had many classes I completely skipped and just taught myself from the book and I did just fine. Only thing you'd be missing out on are the social aspect and if the teacher drops test hints in lecture, though even when I was in school most of the big lectures were being recorded so even that wasn't an issue.
mindfulhack 7y ago
Due to what we know of history, universities who deploy this type of system will clearly not be the melting pots of tomorrow's leaders, geniuses, and world changers. Neither do I see how this helps a university's bottom line. To me this seems only like a university-killing move, by forcing many talented folks to non-campus ways of learning - or other institutions that respect diversity.
- DreamScatter 7y ago
  Yep, I am already a non-academic mathematics researcher. Pursuing the degree and putting up with the toxic university environment is not worth it.
sacman08 7y ago
What a terrible turn to combat online schooling...
catchmeifyoucan 7y ago
> "calculate personalized risk scores” Seems like they're trying to predict social outcomes. Red flag. Also seems the technology behind this is a BLE Beacon - would be hillarious if someone dropped a rasperrby pi in the class in some corner that kept making web requests on your behalf the entire year. Attending class is a choice - and that decision is best left up to the student.
Bostonian 7y ago
A large fraction of student borrowers are not repaying their loans, as documented at https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/10/who-borrows-for-collegeand-who-repays.html https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/10/who-bo... . In a private loan market, lenders would monitor how students are doing in college when deciding what interest rates to charge each semester or whether to make further loans at all. This would encourage college students to attend class and work harder.
ineedasername 7y ago
Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics: First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional private non-profit schools. For-profit schools are much less scrupulous and should not be regarded as trustworthy in this respect) Beyond this, students are apprised of these uses of data with the ability to opt out. This is done as upfront as we can, very "in your face", though the tendency to click "agree" to something without reading, even very short and to the point, is of course always an issue. Finally, the data collected is extremely useful. I cannot emphasize that enough. It is extremely useful in helping students be more successful. And it's not used in terms of surveillance. It's used pretty much exclusive in understanding the patterns the coincide with success and those that coincide with failure, dropout, academic struggling, and so on. In short, it is used to proactively intervene with students at risk rather than wait for it to be too late, e.g., final grades are in and no tutoring intervention is possible. A recent use had me using Xgboost to examine patterns of LMS usage to determine students at risk of early drop out. It worked, and we can now identify about one third of early drop outs with practically no effort and almost no false positives and work with those students to address there problems before they go too far. I'm sure privacy maximalists will not be satisfied with the above, but really, within the realm of data comprehensive I idividual data collection, I'm not aware of any business, much less an entire industry, that treats such data as responsibly as this, and that really is concerned with using it only to further the best interests of it's constituents. Obviously I'm biased. That probably means things are not as rosy as I envision. But I think it is nonetheless an important and valid synopsis of the issue.
- wott 7y ago
  > It worked Of course, it works. And it would work even better if you permanently installed an anal probe in each student, plus a few electro-stimulators, and an automatic feeder.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
ineedasername 7y ago
Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics: First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional private non-profit schools. For-profit schools are much less scrupulous and should not be regarded as trustworthy in this respect) Beyond this, students are apprised of these uses of data with the ability to opt out. This is done as upfront as we can, very "in your face", though the tendency to click "agree" to something without reading, even very short and to the point, is of course always an issue. Finally, the data collected is extremely useful. I cannot emphasize that enough. Our sole concern and useage profile is directed towards using it to help students be more successful. And it's not used in terms of surveillance. It's used pretty much exclusive in understanding the patterns that coincide with success and those that coincide with failure, dropout, academic struggling, and so on. In short, it is used to proactively intervene with students at risk rather than wait for it to be too late, e.g., final grades are in and no tutoring intervention is possible. A recent use had me using Xgboost to examine patterns of LMS usage to determine students at risk of early drop out. It worked, and we can now identify about one third of early drop outs with practically no effort and almost no false positives and work with those students to address their problems before they go too far. That isn't all about tuition revenue either: often enough it entails helping the student finish out the semester rather than have that time and money wasted at the same time they receive advising on how to transfer to another school that may be better suited to them. I'm sure privacy maximalists will not be satisfied with the above, but really, within the realm of data comprehensive I idividual data collection, I'm not aware of any business, much less an entire industry, that treats such data as responsibly as this, and that really is concerned with using it only to further the best interests of it's constituents. Obviously I'm biased. That probably means things are not as rosy as I envision. But I think it is nonetheless an important and valid synopsis of the issue.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
anigbrowl 7y ago
Also if you don't carry your phone with you everywhere, you're going to penalized for that. Hmm.
3xblah 7y ago
What happens if the athlete gives their phone to someone else who will go to class for them and take notes/record lectures.
ken 7y ago
> “They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.” I can't tell if he realizes that his students find electronically-tracked attendance points more valuable than his lectures. That sounds like a fundamental problem. You can lead a horse to water, and all that. Are these students paying attention in class? Are they getting better grades? If they're showing up to lecture but playing on their phones or reading other books, you've accomplished exactly nothing. The only justification I can imagine is that it's an intro class for freshmen, and so maybe they're trying to ease students into an environment (i.e., the real world) where they have the freedom to do whatever they want, even if it's bad for them. Do they stop requiring this system for upperclass students? They doesn't say, but it doesn't sound like it.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
...so does this mean that if you buy a Librem 5, you'll be automatically considered absent and will recieve a lower grade? I can't imagine the apps these colleges are using would be compatible. I realize this might seem like a lower concern compared to everything else, but it strikes me as one more way that people are permanently locked into the major platforms.
jccalhoun 7y ago
What if a student doesn't have a smart phone (yes they do exist). If they did this at the university I teach at, I would resist using this and there might be some "accidents" with these beacons.
AlphaWeaver 7y ago
Just wanted to chime in here- I'm an undergraduate student at a major state university in the US, but I've also built a (small) start-up in edtech. I condemn schools that are using techniques like Bluetooth beacons to track attendance, but I can say it's definitely not the norm. The vast majority of schools use pure software solutions (apps like Top Hat) to track attendance (if they choose to do so.) These typically function by having a randomly generated code that the professor writes on the board at the start of class, and students then have to enter into their apps. It's not the best, and I generally don't agree with tracking attendance in college courses, but it's certainly less invasive than the system described in the article.
- mzs 7y ago
  What if the student does not have a cellphone?
jupp0r 7y ago
Maybe Jeff Rubin should spend his time improving the quality of his lectures instead of strong arming his students into attendance. From my own college days I remember the really good lectures being mostly full while the bad ones were deserted and people rather spent their time self studying textbooks (which is also fine).
Accacin 7y ago
So I don't even see the point in taking attendance (and as far as I remember at my university in the UK lecturers didn't even take attendence), but if you do, what's wrong with taking a register at the beginning? It's probably cheaper, less error prone and the teach can use their discretion if a student is a little late to class because of ~reasons~.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  For large classes, it’d take a while, and students would show up and leave halfway through.
janstice 7y ago
The uni I work for is about to introduce this, but we're leading with transparency - everything the system sees is on a student-facing dashboard, and there's the opportunity to opt out. And we're targeting engagement rather than attendance - use of the LMS, watching videos, etc rather than basic attendance. And we have had vendors attempting to get us to look at video-based attendance and attention trackers. This is a privacy nightmare so we have always said no, but as we are keen to get a handle on room usage and efficiency, we investigated using the existing cameras used for lecture capture to count the backs of heads - in this case how many is more interesting than who.
Khaine 7y ago
It is no wonder, that young people are growing up with more authoritarian beliefs. All through their life, into early adulthood, a greater power is monitoring and controlling what they do. They then expect the government to have the same power over citizens. Treating people like babies, results in people acting like babies. Treating people with respect and autonomy like adults, makes adults.
mjparrott 7y ago
What if you don’t have a smart phone or if your phone dies? I know most people have one ... but this makes it a requirement. Maybe it already was one?
deleted 7y ago
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TurkishPoptart 7y ago
One way to resolve this is to pay vigilante students to remove and destroy these unwanted tracking devices. >The launch was so sudden that some students were alarmed to see an unknown man enter their classroom, stick a small device near their desks, and walk away. The student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, reported on “an individual” entering class to install a “tracking device” and filed for school records related to the SpotterEDU contract. This can be undone.
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
So now it seems like students are required to bring a smartphone with them on their way to class. So, if they leave their phone at home, this ridiculous system will mark them as "absent"? This is pure madness.
quantified 7y ago
Caltech and other top-tier schools (MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, etc.) won't have the problems this was described as addressing, namely students who are at the school but don't care about getting the education. It makes sense that "student-athletes" were the original targets- having a majority focus on sports instead of scholastics has been a real problem in schools with strong NCAA men's programs. There's another background problem here: young adults being given the assumption that they need to install someone else's nanny on their own phone. In the work world, if your employer needs you to use an app on a device, they need to pay for the device- there is no way they can force you to spend your own money on their business requirements. (Unless your employment contract says you need to maintain a smartphone or similar, I've never seen that though.) I have a feeling that carrying school apps on your phone will erode that understanding. And this app sounds like a nice hacking target. I won't elaborate any doubts about the app security or the backend service security, let's just see what happens. Very likely, the schools that are prone to having the problems will institute this more and add more institutional conformity while the schools that aren't won't. The students that go to these institutions will assume more background surveillance while the students to go to better schools will be free of it. If I were back in school I'd probably just give up the attendance points. But I didn't go to a school that was likely to use this
deleted 7y ago
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Pete-Codes 7y ago
Super creepy! Another reason to teach yourself or go to a bootcamp.

266 points by mod50ack 7y ago

I'm a college student myself (my university, as far as I'm aware, has no system such as this). As far as I'm concerned, it's both an insidious creep of social-credit policy and a gross invasion of student privacy. It treats us as children rather than as the adults we are, and seems to me to be a sign of the re-infantalization of colleges. Many generations ago, when the age of majority was for the most part higher, colleges acted in loco parentis for their minor undergraduates. It was during the twentieth century that college students came to be recognized as real adults. But now it seems that the coddling has in many ways increased, and some find it fit again, as one sees here, to surveil us like children. Further, while there have been obvious benefits of technological advancement, they have in large part erased informal procedures and social understanding in favor of a rigid and unforgiving process. For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. Whereas in the past the common practice of most professors would be along the lines of "get it in my mailbox by 4 p.m.", or something like that, but with the informal understanding that at 4:00:00.0...1, the door of the mailbox would not close and chop off your hand. And exceptions to rules were easier to get before the arbiter of the rules became a severe and unfeeling one.

threatofrain 7y ago
I don't think those informal understandings should stay so informal. If it's the fact that having your paper due by 4:20 is fine, then let it be 4:20, although the midnight deadline is likely something most people wouldn't do if they had to collect submissions in person, and so in this scenario we have automation possibly enabling more flexibility in student schedules. If students need extra room to pass the bar and it is a meaningful relaxation of rules, then let it be known so that the matter can be studied. Why? Because empathy at scale works in ways which breeds hostility among groups and it creates an unhealthy incentive to compete over a teacher; it's not really reasonable to expect people to be immune to race or class or sex. Further, if the rules are strict then people need to know rather than _some_ people getting the discretionary treatment and others not.
- esotericn 7y ago
  Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion? Is it actually _better_, or does it just maximise specific metrics that you're able to easily quantify? More to the point - do you want to _be_ that person? I'm glad that my professors were human beings and not automatons - I probably wouldn't have done well otherwise (bureaucrats are not my idea of good role models).
  - Zenst 7y ago
    > Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion? You mean a tech companies support as many anecdote has attested over the years upon Ycombinator with cries of trying to just speak with a human and that sad trend that if you want tech-support with a human it can boil down to knowing somebody who knows somebody who works there who can humanise the issue. With that in mind, think we are already there alas. The aspect that you get emails from companies that are donotreply and to actually reply entails reading thru numerous fineprint to find an email that will automatically process you response. Yes the days of drive-by support are well are truly here.
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    We could speak the same way about police to make it obvious why some people don’t like the double edge of discretion. Isn’t it such a burden that police have to wear cameras? It’s probably much harder to exercise any executive discretion that way, let alone have any natural conversation, especially when people may demand lawsuits and firings over such footage. Must police be very equally kind to both white and black kids, like in some politically correct universe? Why then do some people demand cameras? Don’t they like the good old neighborhood discretion? Why is it so hard to feel for those who receive the shitty edge of discretion? Is it because the other side is so sweet? Another side of discretion is that some judges are harsher in sentencing before vs after lunch. But such a human interface...
    - 7y ago
im3w1l 7y ago
This never happened to me at any age. So maybe it's not about age. Maybe it's about generation.
brian-armstrong 7y ago
I think it's great. Western-style democracy is on its way out and we will probably see its end before our own deaths. It's good to start easing younger generations into an absolute surveillance so that the transition will be easier for them to accept later.
knzhou 7y ago
> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cutoff, and any position of it will lead to complaints. Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff. If you have a good reason for an extension, you can still get it. But there's no reason anybody needs, specifically, the extra second after a formal deadline. If the deadline were moved to a second after midnight, you would try to submit two seconds after midnight and complain, and so on. (I mean, why do you think deadlines are at midnight in the first place? Because in-person collection would stop working at 5 PM, leading to complaints, so deadlines were extended to midnight to let people work at night.) This is pointless slippage, and the resolution from the student side is so easy. Just pretend every deadline is 5 minutes earlier than it actually is, and you'll never have problems.
- itronitron 7y ago
  Slippage is never pointless but rather an important aspect for any efficient system. If you are setting the deadline at midnight instead of 4pm then you are making most of the students work longer on the assignment. Set the hard deadline to 4pm and then allow a few students to submit late. That ends up being less of a burden on students and society.
  - knzhou 7y ago
    That’s not any different. Now how late are you allowed to submit? 5 PM? Sometime at night? Midnight? How many people are allowed to submit late? What if word gets out that everybody is allowed to? You get the exact same problem, except that more of the professor and TA’s time is wasted, and the whole process now has favoritism baked in. I have seen deadlines wrap all the way around a 24 hour cycle in this way. 5 PM is bad because people want to work at night, so delay to midnight. Well, people aren’t finishing, so delay to 5 AM, since everybody would be asleep then. Well now people are blaming you for “forcing” them to do all nighters, so delay to 9 AM. Now people say that’s unreasonable, because submitting later in the workday wouldn’t hurt anyone. So delay to 5 PM.
cvwright 7y ago
The way it works in my courses is, there’s a hard deadline (usually 10pm) for getting full credit. Then for the next two hours (typically until midnight) you can still submit for 95% of the points. I often also allow even later submissions, but with increasing penalty up to 50%.
UncleEntity 7y ago
> Whereas in the past the common practice of most professors would be along the lines of "get it in my mailbox by 4 p.m."... I had professors who would give their home address so you could get your assignment turned in on the calendar day and not get docked for it being late -- distinctly remember having to drive to the next town over to do that once. Then again this was before the internets were all popular so they couldn't really expect the students to submit it by email.
JadeNB 7y ago
> Further, while there have been obvious benefits of technological advancement, they have in large part erased informal procedures and social understanding in favor of a rigid and unforgiving process. For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. Whereas in the past the common practice of most professors would be along the lines of "get it in my mailbox by 4 p.m.", or something like that, but with the informal understanding that at 4:00:00.0...1, the door of the mailbox would not close and chop off your hand. And exceptions to rules were easier to get before the arbiter of the rules became a severe and unfeeling one. Speaking as a professor, there are plenty of severe and unfeeling professors out there. Thinking both as a student and as a professor, I'd much rather have everyone subject to the same inflexible rules, rather than to have some students favoured and some disfavoured based on what will inevitably be a subjective opinion—I'll be likely, even if subconsciously, to favour a student who has made a positive impression over one who has made a negative impression (when it is likely the latter who needs more help to get back on an equal footing!), or a student who asks on a good day than one who asks on a bad.
toomanybeersies 7y ago
At least at my university, if you had a good excuse you could usually email your lecturer your late assignment. Missing the cutoff by a couple of minutes was generally considered a good excuse. My university was very reasonable though, they let me sit an exam 2 days late because I had to fly out for a job interview, they simply made me promise that I wouldn't ask my classmates about the exam. Funnily enough I actually ended up failing that paper anyway, but the opportunity was appreciated.
cbsmith 7y ago
I don't grok the insidious creep of social credit policy or the gross invasion of student privacy. You're attending a lecture at a college. You're not in a private location. Traditionally, what the beacons were doing would be done by TAs taking attendance, class participation grading, or simply by having trivial pop quizzes during class. Adding bluetooth beacons just makes the process more efficient (and makes it easier for students to fool the system), but it doesn't change its essential nature. Making lecture attendance a part of your grade may seem like bad policy or infantalizing to you, but that doesn't make it an invasion of privacy or social-credit policy. Your tangential advocacy about "social understanding" missing the negative consequences of that approach. In particular that inconsistency of rule application creates a hole you can drive a truck through for all kinds of unfair and biased consequences (literally exactly what is brought to the table by a "feeling" application of the rules), and with little gained. While thoughtful empathic responses can be very helpful in a lot of situations, I don't think you've made a good case for this one.
- mod50ack 7y ago
  (relatively) fine for the class attendance (although I still don't feel comfortable with that kind of mechanism for doing it). But the article talks about interventions based on a constant monitoring under the guise of "caring about students' mental health". Now, I suppose I am glad their intentions are in the right place, but I would feel rather infantilized if anybody saw it fit to track me around the clock like that. It's true that unwritten social rules aren't 100% fair. They're not entirely consistent either. But the foremost one I was thinking about was the increased acceptance of human margin of error in accounting: humans, unlike computers, don't count down the the nanosecond. I've had assignments automatically marked as late because they only finished transferring over the network a second after the due time. A human would never say that's late. Could you tell me that I should be submitting earlier? Sure, fine, but I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo. Thankfully in all those cases I've been manually marked not late. But I don't think it's entirely beneficial for us humans to deal with a machine-type accounting of time for our own actions.
  - cbsmith 7y ago
seem_2211 7y ago
I went to University that had a similar deadline system (sometimes midnight, sometimes midday, sometimes 3pm - all depended on the lecturer/tutor). If you had a truly extenuating circumstance, you could always speak to the lecturer via email or during their office hours. Some had more relaxed policies than others, while others had various penalties for being late. As far as I'm aware, the difference between 12:00:00 and 12:00:30 wasn't ever really a thing, as any reasonable system can expect a few minutes of delay owing to computer problems.
anoncake 7y ago
The real informal understanding IMHO was that rules should be there for a sensible reason. The reason for giving a 4pm deadline usually is that you want to grade the submissions sometime after 4pm. The reason for giving a midnight deadline is that it is a deadline and you've got to give deadlines.

hackworks 7y ago

Schools and colleges should ideally be a place for creativity, free thinkers and open by default. Using surveillance and improving attendance through fear tactics is not going to help. You will get their physical presence but not their involvement. I wonder how long it will take for students to start placing check Bluetooth devices in all places they are expected to be present and remotely switch them at desired times. I hope this happens and defeats this unethical forced surveillance by colleges. Alternatively, I would encourage student counselors spend a little more time with students and assist them to monitor themselves. Motivate the youngsters to better regulate themselves and grow up to be independent and responsible adults. Note: On Android, there is an app named Tasker. You can automate your phone with it. Schools could start maintaining shared Tasker profiles that can help students stick to some well defined and commonly followed routines. This is giving control back to the student and coaching them about the merits in planning and sticking to plans.

sebasmurphy 7y ago

Not sure if this is still the case or not but at Maryland circa. 2007-2010 it was school policy that no class could have attendance factored into the grade. If you wanted to skip every class and only show up for exams, that was your choice. Privacy implications aside, I feel that this should be the case everywhere since college is effectively a business transaction. What you decide to do with the product after you've paid should be entirely up to you.

mnm1 7y ago
Seriously. I was lowered an entire grade in one class for not attending despite my work being of the highest quality. Attendance was not even listed as part of the grade on the syllabus so I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time. Teachers that do that should be fired. As should teachers that lose your midterm. But I doubt anyone cares about the students and the impact things like this have on them. Then we wonder why people cheat at the highest levels of our society. Because our society and education system encourages them to cheat by showing students in the harshest way possible that the rules are stacked against them and the playing field is uneven. And I paid over $100k to have my work devalued while being treated like an infant.
- astura 7y ago
  > I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time Ever heard of a pop quiz?
  - savolai 7y ago
    That’s not the kind of unexpected situation the comment you are replying to is referring to at all. If the rules are not set in advance, they are basically arbitrary.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    Pop quizzes should be used to give the teacher information about what the students are actually understanding vs not understanding, not to actually determine a student's grade in a class.

sys_64738 7y ago

What's wrong with an attendance sheet?

t34543 7y ago
Why does attendance matter?
- astura 7y ago
  That's where you learn the material? Beyond that most of my anthropology classes (I minored in anthropology) had class discussion as part of the grade. I even had one professor who had us move the desks into a big circle as we entered (and put them back as we were leaving) in order to better facilitate discussion. Also you'd have to be there to hand in previous assignments and get new assignments. Most of my classes (in all classes) had assignments due either every day or at least most days. You'd also have to be there to hear about changes in the schedule. If you only show up for tests and the day of the test changes you'd need to know. Plus pop quizzes. They aren't used much in college, but I think I had one or two.
  - blihp 7y ago
    Attendance is irrelevant to most of your points: 1) Some can learn the material without attending. If they don't learn it, their grade will reflect that. 2) If one is present but doesn't participate, how does taking attendance help reflect that? (This is just a lazy prof/TA as they really should be noting participation, rather than attendance, if it's relevant to grading for a course) 3) If your assignment(s) don't get handed in, they don't get handed in and your grade will reflect that. 4) If you don't attend and show up on the right day for tests etc, your grade will reflect that. 5) If you're not there for a pop quiz, your grade will reflect that. Taking attendance is a weak mechanism at best to address any of these issues. One of the things that college should be doing is preparing people for the real world where they won't have paid babysitters. Classes are proxies for meetings etc. where you may, or may not, show up but are responsible for the content covered either way. Taking attendance just reinforces the view that the students are still children.

hooloovoo_zoo 7y ago

How hard would it be to make a device that spoofs everyone's phone?

DailyHN 7y ago
Not hard. No dedicated device required, either. It requires reverse engineering which data in being transferred to the school. This likely occurs using a simple HTTP request. Or series of requests. Copy the data from that HTTP request. Then replicate those HTTP requests.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  That works only if the app authors have no basic idea of security
  - nokya 7y ago
    Good news: that's very likely the case for the system described in the article.

ryzvonusef 7y ago

""Several students said they didn’t mind a system designed to keep them honest. But one of them, a freshman athlete at Temple University who asked to speak anonymously to avoid team punishment, said the SpotterEDU app has become a nightmare, marking him absent when he’s sitting in class and marking him late when he’s on time. He said he squandered several of his early lectures trying to convince the app he was present, toggling his settings in desperation as professors needled him to put the phone away. He then had to defend himself to campus staff members, who believed the data more than him."" This is downside of tech, false positive and negatives Also, couldn't you just buy a cheap burner phone and hand it to a friend to take to class for you? Just because the phone is there doesn't mean the person is.

wck0 7y ago
That's likely a violation of the institution's academic honesty policy.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  I recall that Harvard employed the "honor system" which required each student to be truthful on all things academic but that it all assumed honor in the student - it had the assumption that the university would not engage in constant surveillance of the students. A policy of "we'll surveil you as much as technologically possible and we are allowed to harshly punish all evasions of this surveillance" is essentially a "dishonor" policy, indistinguishable from the policies that prisoners face.
- ken 7y ago
  True, but it's a two-way street. An academic honesty policy seems predicated on the assumption that the system run by faculty is inherently honest. > [...] said the SpotterEDU app has become a nightmare, marking him absent when he’s sitting in class and marking him late when he’s on time. He said he squandered several of his early lectures trying to convince the app he was present, toggling his settings in desperation as professors needled him to put the phone away. He then had to defend himself to campus staff members, who believed the data more than him. I pride myself on my honesty, but even I would have a hard time feeling bad about cheating this system.

x100100 7y ago

Disgusting that an IT "professor" forces students to install spyware on their own hardware. Students should unite and collectively uninstall the malware.

sverige 7y ago
Now, now, don't get too frisky there or these same people might get the idea to uninstall the spyware put on their phones by the manufacturer, the carrier, the OS provider, and the app devs. Then where would we end up? [/s]

montjoy 7y ago

This is so ripe for abuse. I would not want my daughter going to a school that implemented such a program.

esotericn 7y ago

Weird. My university didn't care if you attended lectures. Why would they? It's not a prison camp. More focused tutorials with 1 on 2 or 1 on 4, sure. Not everything needs to 'scale'.

_vertigo 7y ago
In my experience it varied from professor to professor. Many professors would notice when you don't attend lecture, which I found to be impressive given the size of some of the classes. I found that some professors were more likely to be lenient or accommodating if they recognized you as a frequent and engaged attender, or if you went to office hours or asked insightful questions during lecture. On the other hand, there were classes I didn't attend very often at all, and I remember a couple of times being stumped on the homework and going to office hours to gain some traction only to be gently ribbed for not going to lecture. You get the sense that many professors do pay attention to that kind of thing and it does factor in, if only unconsciously.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dpflan 7y ago

> “We’re reinforcing this sense of powerlessness … when we could be asking harder questions, like: Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?” This is a great rebuttal. The tracking app of focus, SpotterEDU, was made to target student athletes and reduce truancy. But the founder has an odd history and this just smells of a money grab under the guise of helping students. The professors who lay laurels on the application because attendance is up need to assess performance of their classrooms with the app and those from the past without it to really make a statement.

joe_the_user 7y ago
In the early 80s at several large universities I knew of, it wasn't uncommon for attendance at lectures to be effectively optional. The student was expected to do the homework, pass the midterm and final and maybe participate in discussions in a small section with a TA or graduate student. This varied from class to class, of course. Still, this was an incentive for a given professor to make their lecture interesting and useful enough that students wanted to attend.
cortesoft 7y ago
This reminds me of when I was at university 20 years ago.... I had a friend who was paid to follow a basketball player to class and make sure he went. The player didn't even know he was being followed, my friend reported his info directly to the athletic department. Always stuck out to me as an example of how ridiculous college sports are. I guess now they have just automated that job.
QuesnayJr 7y ago
The app sounds like a dystopian nightmare, but this rebuttal is equally bad. Students are adults. If they don't want to show up, then they can not show up. If they can't muster the internal motivation to go to college and do the work, then that's on them.

edflsafoiewq 7y ago

What happens if you don't own a smart phone?

kart23 7y ago
You probably just don't get those attendance points?
- drdeadringer 7y ago
  ... and then your grades suffer because you don't have a smartphone? Or what am I missing?
deleted 7y ago
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2stop 7y ago

So... Turn off Bluetooth/wifi... Attend. Take a selfie. Proof of false negative. Never show up again. This is very easily solvable without outrage.

drewg123 7y ago

I find it telling that they are afraid of letting students know what their bluetooth receivers look like. I know that if I was in still school and being tracked like this, I'd ether vandalize or come up with a way to jam those receivers..

jahmed 7y ago
I think you answered your own question and I'd be right there with you.

whatsmyusername 7y ago

Yeah that's incredibly creepy.

motohagiography 7y ago

Real question is, what are we educating people to be?

savolai 7y ago
This, so much. I was a developer in the Moodle community once. I was several times puzzled by how deep the interest of teachers was to just get to control students, regardless of whether it seemed to serve any apparent learning goal/purpose.
ikeyany 7y ago
Compliant, and then time permitting, students.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> The dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed An appropriate dream for a college administrator. But a travesty for creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists. I’d be curious. Would these same administrators object to their timeliness being similarly measured? Quantified coffee-break time theft, for example, could be deducted from pay cheques.

isthis1984 7y ago
I've observed there are a class of people that desire to keep everyone else under control. There seems to be no other reason than it makes them feel better, the fact that some people are not under control makes them feel uneasy. These people seem to be inserting themselves everywhere, IT is a bonanza for these people. Anyone know any psychology researching this? It's something that's been irritating me more and more since I've noticed it.
- userbinator 7y ago
  It's called authoritarianism.
  - isthis1984 7y ago
    Thanks, @droithomme's comment put me onto that to, I didn't realise it was classed as a personality type not just a form of government. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personality https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authoritarian_Personalit... this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. The book is here https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-Adorno/dp/1788731646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+authoritarian+personality&qid=1577312193&sr=8-1 https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-A... the comments are an interesting study alone.
    - marcoperaza 7y ago

WalterBright 7y ago

> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and enjoying being treated as an adult for the first time in my life. Nobody was telling me to go to class, admonishing me for not going, giving me credit for attendance or docking me for not. The freshman EE class professor was famous (infamous?) for scheduling his lectures at 8AM, because he only wanted the interested students showing up at them.

grawprog 7y ago
My school was the same. The teachers told us straight up, they didn't care if we showed up or not, we were paying to be there, the teachers got paid the same whether we showed up or not and in the end, if we chose not to show up for a lecture, there's a good chance we wouldn't know the material well enough to pass the tests on it anyway, so our grades just always reflected our own efforts. I remember missing one stats lecture, for a good reason, and being nearly completely screwed over for a bit after that. I ended up having to teach myself the stuff I missed just to stay caught up.
ellius 7y ago
I attended a private high school that gave us a remarkable degree of freedom at a young age. We were allowed to drive off campus as upper classmen, choose a wide range of electives, and generally were treated as the near-adults we were. Recently I read that my high school is instituting a random drug testing policy. I wrote a letter (that I'm sure they promptly ignored) saying how the thing I most remember about my high school experience is that I was trusted with a high degree of autonomy, and in return I was expected to act responsibly and to think about issues with a seriousness not often expected of teenagers in our society. It seems like more and more these infantilizing policies are becoming a norm in our society. Instead of trusting human beings and granting them personal autonomy and responsibility, we act like imposing ever-greater layers of rules and controls will produce good citizens. Frankly I think this is a disastrous approach and is creating entitled, helpless, and childish adults. It's a massive disservice to ourselves and our society. I'll never forget my first day of college. Lots of the other kids in my dorm were running around like crazy people. You could tell they'd never really been free to be themselves and run their own affairs. I felt very different. While it was a significant change to be totally on my own, it felt like a natural extension of the freedom I had slowly been granted over the previous two or three years. I was ready to deal with it. I didn't do everything perfectly, and I could have made better decisions, but by and large I felt like the transition to adulthood was comfortable and natural. The more we impose these command-and-control models, the more I fear we are robbing our children of that same feeling and casting them into adulthood with poorer tools than we were given.

droithomme 7y ago

no paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/colleges-are-turning-students-phones-into-surveillance-machines-tracking-the-locations-of-hundreds-of-thousands/ar-BBYiX9M https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/colleges-are-turning-stude...

WalterBright 7y ago

> the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day. I already turned off the bluetooth on my phone. I guess I should turn off the wifi when I'm not home, too.

sansnomme 7y ago
Unless they are doing deep packet inspection or analyzing your browser through a wifi login portal, I think an iPhone's MAC randomization should be able to defeat WiFi-based tracking (barring WiFi-as-radar, those are much more difficult to evade, there is a ton of metadata you can collect from stuff like breathing, gait and heart rate etc. Cross reference with CCTV to prevent false positives.).
- novok 7y ago
  If you are 'logged in' into a wifi network, then MAC address randomization is turned off for that network and the iPhone gives the real MAC address of the device. It's only used in non connected scenarios such as scanning for available networks. Another bad thing is how iBeacon bluetooth is something you can't turn off specifically on an iPhone if you have bluetooth on in any capacity. And there is no per app privacy permission to turn off ibeacon processing. It's a huge privacy violation and I always wonder why it's not brought up that much.
  - sansnomme 7y ago
    Oh that's terrible, I also thought the randomization is constantly on. Is this the case for Android and the desktop operating systems too? Windows, OS X, Ubuntu etc.?
    - jldugger 7y ago
      Your connection with the AP is bound to a particular MAC. You could randomize it per AP, but you can't like, randomize the MAC for every packet.

clubm8 7y ago

The problem is many classes don't require attendance, especially the sort obsessed with making sure athletes are present as mentioned. This is about forcing compliance. The REAL issue is people unprepared for college come, do not attend lectures, fail out, and complain. Conversely, students who understand that a class is rote memorization and put in the memorization at a time of their choosing after reviewing the powerpoint are penalized if they have physical/mental/social issues that sometimes prevent them from being attentive at a specific time in a specific place. If instructors want to complain about grade grubbing and cheating, they need to focus on teaching, not measuring compliance.

vector_spaces 7y ago

I'm 32 years old, going back to school part time to finish up my degree. I'm paying tuition fully out of pocket. Thankfully my school doesn't seem to be doing this yet, but if they did, there's absolutely no way I would tolerate them surveilling me and treating me like a child like this I'm paying them, so if I choose to skip class that's on me. And thanks but no thanks for trying to assess my mental health -- I already pay people who are actually qualified to do that for me. Also, why is it that in articles like this they can always find someone willing to say "this isn't invasive, I have nothing to hide"? Christ.

bitwize 7y ago
It's not so bad: https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-02-27 https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-02-27

mentos 7y ago

Why are kids paying for school if they’re not going to class?

banads 7y ago
To get a degree -> to get a job. For me personally, there were many classes that I could easily pass without needing to go to class
aratakareigen 7y ago
I stay at home and read the lecture slides on my computer because it's easier for me, and lets me be nocturnal. Am I really missing out on that much by not being there?
- N3cr0ph4g1st 7y ago
  Depends on your style and the class. In undergrad I had many classes I completely skipped and just taught myself from the book and I did just fine. Only thing you'd be missing out on are the social aspect and if the teacher drops test hints in lecture, though even when I was in school most of the big lectures were being recorded so even that wasn't an issue.

mindfulhack 7y ago

Due to what we know of history, universities who deploy this type of system will clearly not be the melting pots of tomorrow's leaders, geniuses, and world changers. Neither do I see how this helps a university's bottom line. To me this seems only like a university-killing move, by forcing many talented folks to non-campus ways of learning - or other institutions that respect diversity.

DreamScatter 7y ago
Yep, I am already a non-academic mathematics researcher. Pursuing the degree and putting up with the toxic university environment is not worth it.

sacman08 7y ago

What a terrible turn to combat online schooling...

catchmeifyoucan 7y ago

> "calculate personalized risk scores” Seems like they're trying to predict social outcomes. Red flag. Also seems the technology behind this is a BLE Beacon - would be hillarious if someone dropped a rasperrby pi in the class in some corner that kept making web requests on your behalf the entire year. Attending class is a choice - and that decision is best left up to the student.

Bostonian 7y ago

A large fraction of student borrowers are not repaying their loans, as documented at https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/10/who-borrows-for-collegeand-who-repays.html https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2019/10/who-bo... . In a private loan market, lenders would monitor how students are doing in college when deciding what interest rates to charge each semester or whether to make further loans at all. This would encourage college students to attend class and work harder.

ineedasername 7y ago

Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics: First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional private non-profit schools. For-profit schools are much less scrupulous and should not be regarded as trustworthy in this respect) Beyond this, students are apprised of these uses of data with the ability to opt out. This is done as upfront as we can, very "in your face", though the tendency to click "agree" to something without reading, even very short and to the point, is of course always an issue. Finally, the data collected is extremely useful. I cannot emphasize that enough. It is extremely useful in helping students be more successful. And it's not used in terms of surveillance. It's used pretty much exclusive in understanding the patterns the coincide with success and those that coincide with failure, dropout, academic struggling, and so on. In short, it is used to proactively intervene with students at risk rather than wait for it to be too late, e.g., final grades are in and no tutoring intervention is possible. A recent use had me using Xgboost to examine patterns of LMS usage to determine students at risk of early drop out. It worked, and we can now identify about one third of early drop outs with practically no effort and almost no false positives and work with those students to address there problems before they go too far. I'm sure privacy maximalists will not be satisfied with the above, but really, within the realm of data comprehensive I idividual data collection, I'm not aware of any business, much less an entire industry, that treats such data as responsibly as this, and that really is concerned with using it only to further the best interests of it's constituents. Obviously I'm biased. That probably means things are not as rosy as I envision. But I think it is nonetheless an important and valid synopsis of the issue.

wott 7y ago
> It worked Of course, it works. And it would work even better if you permanently installed an anal probe in each student, plus a few electro-stimulators, and an automatic feeder.
- ineedasername 7y ago

ineedasername 7y ago

Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics: First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional private non-profit schools. For-profit schools are much less scrupulous and should not be regarded as trustworthy in this respect) Beyond this, students are apprised of these uses of data with the ability to opt out. This is done as upfront as we can, very "in your face", though the tendency to click "agree" to something without reading, even very short and to the point, is of course always an issue. Finally, the data collected is extremely useful. I cannot emphasize that enough. Our sole concern and useage profile is directed towards using it to help students be more successful. And it's not used in terms of surveillance. It's used pretty much exclusive in understanding the patterns that coincide with success and those that coincide with failure, dropout, academic struggling, and so on. In short, it is used to proactively intervene with students at risk rather than wait for it to be too late, e.g., final grades are in and no tutoring intervention is possible. A recent use had me using Xgboost to examine patterns of LMS usage to determine students at risk of early drop out. It worked, and we can now identify about one third of early drop outs with practically no effort and almost no false positives and work with those students to address their problems before they go too far. That isn't all about tuition revenue either: often enough it entails helping the student finish out the semester rather than have that time and money wasted at the same time they receive advising on how to transfer to another school that may be better suited to them. I'm sure privacy maximalists will not be satisfied with the above, but really, within the realm of data comprehensive I idividual data collection, I'm not aware of any business, much less an entire industry, that treats such data as responsibly as this, and that really is concerned with using it only to further the best interests of it's constituents. Obviously I'm biased. That probably means things are not as rosy as I envision. But I think it is nonetheless an important and valid synopsis of the issue.

deleted 7y ago
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anigbrowl 7y ago

Also if you don't carry your phone with you everywhere, you're going to penalized for that. Hmm.

3xblah 7y ago

What happens if the athlete gives their phone to someone else who will go to class for them and take notes/record lectures.

ken 7y ago

> “They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.” I can't tell if he realizes that his students find electronically-tracked attendance points more valuable than his lectures. That sounds like a fundamental problem. You can lead a horse to water, and all that. Are these students paying attention in class? Are they getting better grades? If they're showing up to lecture but playing on their phones or reading other books, you've accomplished exactly nothing. The only justification I can imagine is that it's an intro class for freshmen, and so maybe they're trying to ease students into an environment (i.e., the real world) where they have the freedom to do whatever they want, even if it's bad for them. Do they stop requiring this system for upperclass students? They doesn't say, but it doesn't sound like it.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

...so does this mean that if you buy a Librem 5, you'll be automatically considered absent and will recieve a lower grade? I can't imagine the apps these colleges are using would be compatible. I realize this might seem like a lower concern compared to everything else, but it strikes me as one more way that people are permanently locked into the major platforms.

jccalhoun 7y ago

What if a student doesn't have a smart phone (yes they do exist). If they did this at the university I teach at, I would resist using this and there might be some "accidents" with these beacons.

AlphaWeaver 7y ago

Just wanted to chime in here- I'm an undergraduate student at a major state university in the US, but I've also built a (small) start-up in edtech. I condemn schools that are using techniques like Bluetooth beacons to track attendance, but I can say it's definitely not the norm. The vast majority of schools use pure software solutions (apps like Top Hat) to track attendance (if they choose to do so.) These typically function by having a randomly generated code that the professor writes on the board at the start of class, and students then have to enter into their apps. It's not the best, and I generally don't agree with tracking attendance in college courses, but it's certainly less invasive than the system described in the article.

mzs 7y ago
What if the student does not have a cellphone?

jupp0r 7y ago

Maybe Jeff Rubin should spend his time improving the quality of his lectures instead of strong arming his students into attendance. From my own college days I remember the really good lectures being mostly full while the bad ones were deserted and people rather spent their time self studying textbooks (which is also fine).

Accacin 7y ago

So I don't even see the point in taking attendance (and as far as I remember at my university in the UK lecturers didn't even take attendence), but if you do, what's wrong with taking a register at the beginning? It's probably cheaper, less error prone and the teach can use their discretion if a student is a little late to class because of ~reasons~.

saagarjha 7y ago
For large classes, it’d take a while, and students would show up and leave halfway through.

janstice 7y ago

The uni I work for is about to introduce this, but we're leading with transparency - everything the system sees is on a student-facing dashboard, and there's the opportunity to opt out. And we're targeting engagement rather than attendance - use of the LMS, watching videos, etc rather than basic attendance. And we have had vendors attempting to get us to look at video-based attendance and attention trackers. This is a privacy nightmare so we have always said no, but as we are keen to get a handle on room usage and efficiency, we investigated using the existing cameras used for lecture capture to count the backs of heads - in this case how many is more interesting than who.

Khaine 7y ago

It is no wonder, that young people are growing up with more authoritarian beliefs. All through their life, into early adulthood, a greater power is monitoring and controlling what they do. They then expect the government to have the same power over citizens. Treating people like babies, results in people acting like babies. Treating people with respect and autonomy like adults, makes adults.

mjparrott 7y ago

What if you don’t have a smart phone or if your phone dies? I know most people have one ... but this makes it a requirement. Maybe it already was one?

deleted 7y ago

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TurkishPoptart 7y ago

One way to resolve this is to pay vigilante students to remove and destroy these unwanted tracking devices. >The launch was so sudden that some students were alarmed to see an unknown man enter their classroom, stick a small device near their desks, and walk away. The student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, reported on “an individual” entering class to install a “tracking device” and filed for school records related to the SpotterEDU contract. This can be undone.

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

So now it seems like students are required to bring a smartphone with them on their way to class. So, if they leave their phone at home, this ridiculous system will mark them as "absent"? This is pure madness.

quantified 7y ago

Caltech and other top-tier schools (MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, etc.) won't have the problems this was described as addressing, namely students who are at the school but don't care about getting the education. It makes sense that "student-athletes" were the original targets- having a majority focus on sports instead of scholastics has been a real problem in schools with strong NCAA men's programs. There's another background problem here: young adults being given the assumption that they need to install someone else's nanny on their own phone. In the work world, if your employer needs you to use an app on a device, they need to pay for the device- there is no way they can force you to spend your own money on their business requirements. (Unless your employment contract says you need to maintain a smartphone or similar, I've never seen that though.) I have a feeling that carrying school apps on your phone will erode that understanding. And this app sounds like a nice hacking target. I won't elaborate any doubts about the app security or the backend service security, let's just see what happens. Very likely, the schools that are prone to having the problems will institute this more and add more institutional conformity while the schools that aren't won't. The students that go to these institutions will assume more background surveillance while the students to go to better schools will be free of it. If I were back in school I'd probably just give up the attendance points. But I didn't go to a school that was likely to use this

deleted 7y ago

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Pete-Codes 7y ago

Super creepy! Another reason to teach yourself or go to a bootcamp.