6 ms·

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-c

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.

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.