Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
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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.
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.
It's a shame. I agree with you that giving students more and more freedom as they grow is tremendously helpful to their ability to adapt and be responsible by the time they reach adulthood.
Additionally, I'd be willing to bet school districts have dedicated legal departments, or lawyers on retainer these days and I'd bet that's a recent change.
As for me personally, being dropped into Caltech was like going from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds. I didn't even know how to do my own laundry :-) Getting from LAX to the campus by myself across LA was a very intimidating experience. These days parents bring their kids to college and even set up their quarters for them.
Like if I want to go to the movies on a weeknight - I can do that. If I want to travel out of state on the weekend, it’s no problem. Like, there’s nothing stopping me.
If so, that's disturbing given that college was once the time for young people to enjoy their freedom to the fullest. I remember driving from upstate New York to Boston one weekend on a whim with some friends - in the middle of winter, a memorable adventure.
I didn't realize that my attendance was tracked, because there was a pretty laissez-faire attitude all-around. Most teachers liked me because when I did show up, I was actively present, and the only moment that might've caused me to suspect something was a conversation with a teacher who, in a very friendly way, told me he couldn't give me copies of the notes from the past year because my attendance had been abysmal.
Still, I didn't really think about any of this until the principal called me in and told me he should really expel me. And yet, he was sympathetic to my situation (severe anxiety) and let me off the hook because my grades were okay.
And so in the final months before college I stayed, made sure to attend classes, and finished with acceptable grades.
The very next year (in part perhaps because of me?) the school modernized their systems and I had to listen to the tales of woe from my younger siblings at the same school. None of them could get even close to my behavior because everything was tracked, quantified, part of the new computer system.
My sister got diagnosed with severe ADHD and one of my brothers went for the third-tier track even though he's just as smart as I am.
I'm convinced that the increased measurement and decreased freedom affected them negatively, and I find it very worrying that the siblings that went on to college seem to have similar issues (because, of course, at university I was one of the least-attending students who somehow still got along with the professors and had decent grades).
To be clear, I'm not excusing myself. In hindsight I wish had attended more and put in more effort and played the game better. I'm just saying that I at least had the freedom, in high school and university, to do things my own way and still do okay. this strikes me as very difficult for my younger siblings, because so much more is measured and quantified and required.
On the other hand, schools like the one I went to would have a horrible(r) matriculation rate if students were not forced to attend certain classes. It infuriurates me (and I think students who want to fail should be allowed to fail), but ultimately it's a product of the financial incentive structure; more graduates = more $$$.
And forcing attendance of some classes does indeed increase the likelihood of certain borderline students graduating, nobody can deny that.
I disagree. I was offered admission to zero first rate schools, two second rate schools ($$$$$$ tuition), and my backup which is a third rate school (which I am attending for free).
If my backup school didn't exist, I would either be without a degree, or my parents would have a significant dent in their retirement. I'm willing to put up with the BS of third rate schools so that I can at least have a degree and not be scalped, thank you very much.
I'm grateful that my third rate school exists, no matter how shitty it is.
I will grant you, however, that no school should knowingly take $$$$$ from students and give them an useless degree. But a CS degree? It's pretty cool that I can get that from any school and it's the "same" level of degree whether it's from Caltech or Arizona State.
Just because a student has issues with discipline or motivation I shouldn't let them fail. Tracking attendance improves academic results so I'm not sure what the advantage is to not tracking it.
When I teach classes, if a student does not perform the requisite work to complete the course, I’ve no interest in their success. I am an instructor, not a motivator.
And why do we need instructors? Let's just give each student some textbooks and their exam schedule. If they can't succeed we're not interested in their success.
The Darwinist argument can always be used to withdraw any and all levels of support. You can't use it to justify just the level of support you prefer.
As a college student, you are paying to receive a service. The college fulfilled their obligation that you paid for. Your only obligation is to pay the bill that you agreed to. You are not obliged to make use of the services provided.
It's not the same situation at all.
Service providers can fire customers. If you pay for membership of a club but never attend functions, the club will end your membership.
If the service aims to provide a community or is invested in the success of its customers then it should fire customers who are not invested in their own success.
Not to mention how many students are not customers. They are sponsored by parents and scholarships and heavily subsidized. All these stakeholders have a vested interest in academic success. Tracking attendance is better for all of them.
It's ironic you mention psychologists. Therapists, personal trainers, life coaches, and other 1-to-1 service providers are the most likely to fire a customer for not attending. I personally know someone whose vocal coach made an ultimatum about attendance and ended up firing the customer. This is all very much adult.
In the end it's the sad consumerization of higher education in America. The pricing makes students so bitter as to demand "better service" rather than "better education". A university is more like a job in most of the world.
College isn't a job for the student, it's a training and certification program that the student is paying for. The accreditation agencies that validate that the program is appropriate for the certifications being offered generally do not require attendance tracking, because regularity of attendance isn't what is being certified.
> Why does being an adult university student mean you can be absent for months and still succeed?
Attendance tracking in schools for children serves a number of purposes related to the fact that the students are children, including that students are not entrusted to review the syllabus and evaluate the level of engagement required for success on their own. Most students can't be absent for months and succeed, and if they try they will fail. Attendance tracking isn't needed for that if your assessment, grading, and academic standards are working properly (and attendance tracking doesn't fix the problem if they are not.)
> And why do we need instructors?
Because those are among the educational resources students are paying for (though there are universities where that is less the case than traditional universities, such as the competency-based WGU, which has won high praise from many corners.)
We were treated like adults, and attendance was entirely optional for most lectures and tutorials. If you failed a paper because you didn't go to any lectures, that was your problem.
I totally agree with your school's stance, but I acknowledge tha the current financial incentive structure prevents my school from having the same.
That remains true whether that's a Scandinavian model of fully-paid schools, a US public university model of a partially taxpayer funded & partially student funded or even a private university if it ultimately results in a taxpayer funded loan forgiveness or other subsidy.
The cream in terms of demonstrated capacity for academic performance, which probably has very little correlation to readiness to be treated as an adult. There selection criteria is why they can afford to have rigorous coursework as the basic freshman core, but not why their decision to treat the young adults attending as adults works.
If anything, that policy is part of the selection system: the people that aren't ready for that treatment don't cause problems for other people as much as they would in other systems, they just fail out fairly quickly.
My words may have been misleading. What I'm trying to say is the kind of student that gets admission to Caltech is not the kind of student to neglect going to class out of laziness or whatever and fail out because of that.
Well, I was. I tried repeatedly to skip class and still pass. It did not work. The low point was finals week, first semester, sophomore year. I was looking at flunking out. I had serious pain in my gut from stress.
I squeaked by.
That was it for me. I decided that I was never again going to miss a lecture, always take notes properly, never again skip homework (doing homework was not required), and I would master every single homework problem on time.
That worked for me. I started getting B's, eventually turning into A's.
This was the policy at the community college I went to. No one took attendance, and it was the students' responsibility to make sure they did the work and prepared themselves for exams if they chose not to show up.
One interesting consequence of this is the faculty and students become collaborators rather than adversaries.
At LSE, they used iClickers while I was there for a few lecture hall courses. At least one (LSE100) requires attendance unless one wants to miss their chance of getting a First on the module.
One pushback I've heard from administators on this idea is that it's really hard to answer certain Federal aid questions when the student drops out, like 'when did they last attend class?' if you don't take attendance. And the student Visa programs apparently require attestations about both attending and passing classes.
One former colleague is doing a lot of research and statistics gathering by correlating use of campus swipe cards to grades and other academic warning signs.
If they detect that you’re out late, using soda machines at 3am, bugging out for the weekend, etc they may trigger some of sort intervention.
I attended Caltech (BS '01) and given that they allowed us to take exams home with us, it would have been surprising if a professor took attendance. This was part of the overall honor code (http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/explore/about-caltech/hono...) that looking back, I really appreciated as a student.
a. It was strongly recommended in order to do well in the course (a difficult honors course), and
b. He wanted to make the class interesting enough that we wanted to show up.
The class almost always had perfect attendance. It opened my eyes so much.
If you don’t mind me asking, what Hou(v)se were you in?
Caltech is quite a bit smaller, only 130 undergrads in my graduation class, or something like that (don't recall exactly).
Bill Gross is likely the most famous alumnus of my class. Quite a few in my class (79) became quite wealthy in the tech business, though not the really big money.
That is really interesting that your class size was only 130, AFAICT nowadays they're ~240. At least, the classes of 2022 and 2023 were in that ballpark. (I wonder if Caltech has become less selective, or has just received more applicants?)
Idealab has an active presence on campus even today, so Bill Gross seems to have left his mark :-)
In my experience, uninterested students just slept or played on their phone
I think, at least with my group of friends, those from private schools had more growing up to do in a shorter period because they came from schools that over-supported them, so they weren't prepared to be self sufficient.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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...
It's a really weird comparison to me. Perhaps US profs are way more uptight in general? I'm not really sure how to respond to that, to be honest.
As far as I can tell this is simply a strawman. And even if it's not - the solution is to replace dickhead staff with reasonable human beings, not chain them with process so that everyone suffers.
The key here is, surveillance shouldn't be used against the students who are of low power, but instead against those who decide if the students succeed or not - the professors.
Trusting power is how one gets to significant asymmetry and gross abuses. Surveillance against those types is how you start to counterbalance "discretion".
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2019/11/24/eri...
Like I said, attendance at my University was not mandatory. We weren't treated like children.
For many lectures I felt reading the book would be a better use of my time and so did others.
I think a decay-based system or an “emergency-token” system doesn’t discriminate between students, but still manages to provide humane leeway to get things done.
Police cameras are there to make sure power is not abused, they are not there to eliminate discretion.
There are actually multiple actors in the justice system that have a large degree of discretion, the police, the prosecutor and the judge. To me this indicates that your thesis is erroneous.
Discretion is a matter of trusting power, and as I've mentioned, discretion shrinks in front of a camera. When cameras provide the kind of ammunition to humiliate, sue, or pressure for job termination, then your discretion is compromised. Why did one forgive one youthful offender of marijuana possession and not the other? Was it race? These are potentially humiliating questions.
We can also contemplate what it means for employers to extend monitoring to social media, and whether that compromises your willingness to express your thinking in forums, and whether monitoring employees has anything to do with control and trust. Recently US border patrol agents were found discussing Latinos and other minorities in depraved ways. Does observation of their social media restrict their individual expression? Yes it does.
As to the fact that judges and other parties have discretion, well, I have at least forwarded one example of judges sentencing more harshly based on whether they've had lunch. That is part of discretion -- that some people get to enjoy the sweet fruits and others do not. This humiliating fact about judicial discretion would not have been known without observation.
For example, if you are arriving for a family dinner, if you are 10 minutes late, it's NBD, but if you are 3-4 hours late you have just pissed everyone off.
If you constantly ask for slack from your friends, to the point where it becomes common, your friend's internal & informal credit rating of you would go down, and they start reducing the amount of slack they gave you.
So a policy that reproduces the above would be: Deadline is 4pm, plus a 30 minute 'slack time' for extenuating circumstances (which everyone will put as 4:30). If a problem has come up, then come to me and we will talk about an extension. I won't give you many extensions although if you show a pattern of relying on them.
Imagine a real family that applies these deadlines. You walk in the door and your mother starts talking about applying for an 'extension' for your lateness.
Perhaps at the end of all of this you have the same outcome, that every family member feels the same way about you.
But you don't feel the same way about them in both cases, because in one, they act like robots, and in the other, they act like the imperfect people we all are. In one, they're strange threats, in another, they're lovable human beings.
I can't express strongly enough how nefarious this trend towards engineering all aspect of the human experience into 'process' is.
Theoretically, me having this conversation with you on HN is the same as real life. Practically, it's completely different and the latter would be far preferable if we could do it in the same amount of time, because we're not computers, we have real emotional and physical needs that are unsatisfied if everything is reduced to the most "optimal/efficient" interaction.
It feels like you treat others as threats. Your employer, your professor, the police etc, all threats. The better model is to create a society in which they are your equals - many countries have achieved that - not fence them off as some sort of 'different class of human' and then mitigate the damages.
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.
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.
In my undergraduate education, toxic behavior like this was common. One professor who was a particular asshole deliberately assigned onerous assignments to coincide with an assignment for another critical, difficult class that 75% of the students were taking. Academic hazing was pretty common in CS.
- Due dates are hard (usually midnight)
- Everyone gets 3 "emergency tokens", which give you a 24 hour extension on the assignment, no questions asked. Max 2 per assignment.
- On occasion, you could get an extension without using a token by speaking to the professor in advance, if you had extenuating circumstances.
It was a good compromise between meaningful deadlines and humanity. One particular advantage is that, if you missed the midnight deadline, you knew you were using a town anyway, so there was no pressure to sacrifice sleep to get the assignment in "on time".
Most people I knew were happy with it.
They gave me the freedom I needed to make micro-adjustments to my college/life balance and greatly lowered stress.
As a student, it was, well, nice. It was true that it was a bit harder to be motivated to finish a paper right away, but it also made the process far less stressful. When I turned in papers I thought they were the best they could be.
Of course, I'm sure there were at least some students in her classes who ignored everything until the end of the term or something, and were quite stressed out at the end...
This doesn't work if your class builds on earlier material (most STEM classes). As the professor, I need some feedback as to how well the class understands what I just taught.
Though I ended up with weird reviews. I got just as many students saying I was their best teacher as those saying worst teacher. I also had a surprising number of students try to turn into me the skeleton code I provided them claiming they did the assignment (they'd add like a line or two). Also had students say I was unavailable even though I lived in my office with my door open (students frequently came by outside office hours) and replied to emails between 9am and 1am. Learned that the complaints don't always match what you're doing and are hard to interpret.
Tldr: students will complain no matter what. Just be human. It's easier and less stressful for everyone involved.
As a CS professor, the one thing I could do that flipped things on their head was running an automatic submission and testing system for any assignment.
You're getting 0% or 100%, but you know at all times over roughly 2 weeks exactly what score you are getting. You can resubmit over and over. Yes, I'm going to run extra tests once the deadline passes to make sure no one is punking me, but it's rare that someone who gets 100% on the initial tests doesn't get 100% on the later tests.
And, for those of you who think that 0%/100% is a poor programming assignment scoring system--I'll ask you the same question I ask my students: "0%/100% is bad? So which of you are cool with partial credit when I miscalculate your grades?"
Is there really? In my faculty, doors were kept open. I entered lectures at 20% of time left and nobody would bat an eyelid.
Hard deadline system with some conveniences.
It was possible to upload the work multiple times, and for an hour or so after deathline, to select which of the uploaded copies would be the hand over.
This allowed for e.g. uploading some code that works, and later progressively optimized/improved versions, without fear of uploading something partially broken by the end.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't know humans very well then. A human might say it's late even if you turned it in on time. Heck, a human might say you never turned it in.
> 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.
Hey, I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from thirty years ago. I would still want to reserve the right to correct a final typo from a HN comment from weeks ago. It's nice wanting things. That doesn't make them good ideas.
A computer might try to make corrections right up until the last nanosecond, but a human might wisely recognize they need to get their corrections out of the way well ahead of time and stop looking for typeohs after they've handed in their assignment. ;-)
> 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.
That's absolutely true, and in those cases you'd expect a different approach, regardless of whether there was a machine keeping time or not. I just don't think you've found such a case here.
I wouldn't suggest a measure where a prof was relying on a huge digital clock. I was trying to address a context that wasn't machine driven as you were advocating. There are simpler realities. A prof who will accept submissions until they leave for the day. For remote education, the physical mail thing is very real (or at least it used to be).
If neither party is benefiting from machine precision, there's no reason for the onus to be on the professor or administrator to make allowances for that imprecision. It actually makes a lot of sense for that onus to be on the student.
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.
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.
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.
> [...] 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.
These systems are often pitched as turnkey solutions with very little input from the people on the ground who are expected to support and triage incidents in a system where training is thin if it even exists.
If, before you send your kids off to college, you look at college rankings then you're just as culpable in the use of these metric boosting systems.
as if there aren't sales people in these tech companies pushing these kinds of products.
As opposed to non-tech solutions, which don't have false positive & negatives? Please.
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.
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.
The book is here https://smile.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Personality-Theodor-A... the comments are an interesting study alone.
Throwing a label on it doesn’t make it a bad thing. Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. If everyone just let everyone else do whatever they wanted, humans wouldn’t have gotten very far. Of course, freedom to choose does a lot of good too. There is a balance to be had.
The first and third quotes sentences are probably true, but how in the world does authority or authoritarianism give people motivation? Or do you mean that it substitutes for internal motivation the motivation of an external threat? This is probably true, but it is rarely in the state's, or the authority's, interest to maximise each person's potential individually; the authority will rather prefer to maximise each person's contribution to the authority's good, which likely involves forcing each person into a channel that (for at least some and probably many) poorly serves him or her as an individual.
Potential for what? Pleasing the authoritarian. Authority is about who gets to be the author of a person's life - themselves, or someone else. Authoritarians are people who want to be in charge of other people's lives, but don't like to be accountable to anyone else for their own.
This is a primary driver of people who believe strongly in the minimalism of government or people like myself who believe that processes that bestow authority need to be extremely cautious, and ideally double-blind and short-lived rather than personality-driven.
For what it's worth, though...
>In his “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality” (a text that was not included in the published 1950 work), Adorno laid out a series of objections that call into question the notion of an underlying personality structure; they suggest that under the modern conditions of the late-capitalist culture industry, the individual as a psychic unity is beginning to dissolve. This dissenting perspective deserves notice, especially in an age that has seen the reemergence of authoritarian politics in the United States.
By Adorno's reckoning, we have authoritarianism in both Trump and Clinton.[1]
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344371877214...
[1] "After first sketching Adorno’s conception of the “authoritarian personality,” with the help of Sándor Ferenczi’s concept of the “identification with the aggressor,” the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno’s changed orientation: that “fascism” or “authoritarianism” maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left."
Surely on HN at least we can be free of the idea that only first-rate colleges have (a substantial quantity of) students with such exceptional potential. (I would go even farther and deny that there is any particularly strong correlation between 'rate' of the school and future potential of its students, except in the self-selecting sense that a Harvard degree opens doors that a community-college degree doesn't.)
The specific claim was:
> > Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists".
which is much stronger than saying that more such people are attracted by higher-'rated' colleges; I have no problem with the idea that there are lots of such people at first-rate colleges, only with the idea that there aren't many at other colleges. I agree that the claim says nothing about causality or about 'production' of such students, but neither did I.
And teachers.
While there are some conformist "I am always right, don't stir the shit" authoritarian teachers, there are many who rely in part on students to question and hone the teacher's own expertise, especially people who teach in rapidly changing fields. This is healthy, I think, and many of my best teachers (in and out of structured school) have been like this.
I’ve been told all this extra tuition money isn’t going to professors or research, it’s just going to administration; they are what we’ve mortgaged the future for.
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.
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.
I guess now they have just automated that job.
Ever heard of a pop quiz?
People cheat in life because the rewards are so high, not because they had a bad experience in college. Someone who uses a bad experience in college is just looking for an excuse.
Why?
My classes are typically small, under 15 students, and are heavily discussion dependent. Engendering open discussion between students, as opposed to top-down lecturing, has resulted in keeping students engaged and actively learning in class. If a handful of people decide to skip a class that impacts both their learning outcome as well as it deprives their attending classmates additional and varied perspectives of the issues under discussion. Hence the incentive to attend.
Yes, these are all adults who are engaged in a "business" transaction with the college to be formally educated. However, the students have the opportunity to review the syllabus in advance and the class participation requirement is clearly stated.
A good seminar is 16 people (max, 12 is better). No hand raising needed. The goal is learning and understanding. Ideally there’s not any grades. If there are they should be opaque and subjective up to the instructor :)
Why not give a half letter grade boost to those with good attendance rather than docking a half letter grade to someone who misses a few classes? Why not incentivize with a reward rather than a penalty? The carrot rather than the stick?
> However, the students have the opportunity to review the syllabus in advance and the class participation requirement is clearly stated.
That's fine if only you require attendance and most other professors don't and if your class isn't one of the mandatory classes. But if every professor requires attendance or if your class is mandatory, then students really have no choice when it comes to attendance.
Make class mandatory and even speaking in discussions mandatory, and you end up with a lot of disengaged and annoyed people reiterating the same points just to get the participation grade up. To me that isn't a quality discussion, and therefore a waste of my time and tuition. People rarely get to the meat of a concept in those discussions, if at all, without the teacher jumping in and spelling out the entire point. IMO, better to just lecture and spell out more points, and leave the discussions for the optional study or review sessions attended by the most motivated students.
None of these sessions were instructor mandated. They were part of the normal course curriculum, and were chosen during class registration. The standard setup was M-W Lecture, Fri Discussion.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Treating people like babies, results in people acting like babies. Treating people with respect and autonomy like adults, makes adults.
I already turned off the bluetooth on my phone. I guess I should turn off the wifi when I'm not home, too.
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.
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.
Could it be hacked? How good are university IT security operations?
We're also not a high-profile target: Most hackers looking to crack a system holding personal data seem most concerned with high value targets with millions, not thousands of records. That doesn't stop our security team from treating the possibility with the utmost seriousness though.
However, the above applies to where I work. This is not universally the case. I think most schools are increasingly aware of the potential, are take minimally necessary steps to make sure they aren't wide open, but there are simply too many small schools with 1,000 to 5,000 students that simply don't have the scale needed to really devote resources to this. Again, the low-value target helps here, but it's not great.
Really now? Have you checked your school on Shodan recently?
Long story short, there's enough people doing hacking, with varied enough interests. You don't know what makes someone else tick.
I am somewhat concerned with where this stuff leads, not because I assume it's a one step process between education analytics and oppressive dystopia, but precisely because the use cases you describe seem like great ideas.
I agree that minimizing drop-out rates is important, and that we should avail ourselves of whatever tools we can to do it. What you're describing does not bother me, and seems like a reasonable use of the data.
So why not take it a step further? Let's authorize a limited release of student-identifying data to government social work agencies (like the DHS in the United States), so that concerning student performance data could be correlated with whether a student's family was on income/food/housing assistance. Heck, to maximize the signal, we could even correlate it with families who aren't on assistance but whose homes are likely to be foreclosed upon (leading to a likely student move, possibly changing schools--a very disruptive educational experience whose impact can be mitigated with careful preparation). Why not correlate with criminal records, to help promote after-school programs to students who would otherwise be returning to troubled or dangerous homes?
To be clear, I'm bothered because those things all seem like good ideas. I think they'd probably work, if done properly. And would probably help a lot of people. The systems we have currently to try to accomplish those things (overworked social workers, underfunded public-education and after-school programs) aren't succeeding.
...they'd also result in a de facto surveillance state.
If that data were compromised by or sold to an outside (nongovernment) entity, the damage due to the breach would be very severe, from inability to get financing (because lenders know details about your life that may not be reflected on your credit score) to individual persecution (e.g. employer discrimination against family members whose leaked data indicated their financial/housing situation may put their long-term employment at risk).
If the government programs using that data were "compromised" (i.e. staffed, perhaps via an electoral sea-change, with discriminatory people), the damage would be even worse. School funding allocation could suffer because someone at the top decided "Our data shows that so many of the students at $school_x have so much else going against them in their lives--why bother? Starve that school for funding and let it wither; that money would be better allocated to schools attended by our kids/kids of different races/kids with higher income." Additionally, correlations could be dishonestly interpreted by bigoted officials ("the algorithm says that female/male/dyslexic/$race_x kids are a lost cause!").
There are other, logistical issues. If school staff (i.e. counselors) have direct access to all this information, could they discriminate against kids and their families if bigoted? If school staff didn't have direct access, will the right conclusions be drawn by distant analysts (or worse, algorithms) without the personal context of counselors and teachers? A failure to consider all those factors could result in IEP-like things that harm, rather than help (consider: "You talked back to counselor Bob, so he won't authorize you for additional meal points or recommend you for after-school tutoring in an area where you're struggling", or "the DOE algorithm decided you need to take more English classes even though counselor John has been working on getting you individual reading time because he knows there's a bullying risk from other kids in the English program").
Many of these things are already happening, in varying degrees. I worry that making ubiquitous data available could make them worse, if it is not done carefully.
I am also sensitive to the benefits that education analytics (and more pervasive, cross-cutting data availability for government use across the board) can provide. I think the answer is to proceed carefully (i.e. the opt-out buttons you discuss, and careful data anonymization whenever it makes sense to do so) and to insist on comprehensive regulation regarding data exchange between government programs, and between those programs and non-government entities.
EDITS: explained logistical issues. Typos.
To address misuse in general: That is always a problem, with any technology, tool, data... anything. It's important that we don't discard useful tools due to potential misuse though. Instead, it's of the utmost importance that, at the outset, issues of misuse be enumerated, discussed, mitigation strategies thought out, how to accurately talk about data gathered, the insights obtained, what they can and cannot be used for from a statistical analysis (correlation != causation etc. type of thing) and so on. Let me talk a little about what we did at my institution along these lines. It wasn't perfect, we could have done better, but in the outlines I think it formed a pretty good starting place for a template of how society should engage in conversations about issues that arise from the current revolution in our ability to gather data on individuals:
In 2014 we started using an LMS system that made data collection on easy. I was given sole access to that data to begin exploring and cataloging the available data being collected, it's possible uses, potential points of concern. I had sole access, but those things I was looking for were done in intense conversation with administrative and faculty colleagues, including the university executive board and the faculty union and faculty senate along with conversations with students. During this process, no else had the level of unfettered access that I did (I am a data analyst) not even the system administrators. (Technically they could have granted themselves access though, but if they didn't go through the proper channels, such a thing is a firing offense.)
This went on for about three years, all the while I was able to accumulate data and evaluate it against actual student performance and validate its utility and continue to report back on my findings to further the discussions going on. When that stage of actually using the data to drive conversations ended, I took a step back and simply spoke at gatherings every once in a while to go over what I'd done, findings, etc. After that, for the next two years, it was in the hands of the administration working up policies in conversation with faculty surrounding expectations for responsible use of this information. To say there were disagreements would be an understatement. But over time tentative points of compromise were reached, and for the past 2 years were have begun carefully rolling out initiatives that utilize all of this. We are cautious. We are open. We continue to have conversations with valid concerns on all sides that we seek good compromises for.
Again, the above wasn't perfect, but it's a good outline of how responsible use of data should be approached.
These things should not be allowed to be proprietary software.. if I attend a public institution that surveils me, I want the surveilance software to be fully open source and I want to be able to know all the data points you would have on me.
Then, I would like to decide for myself whether I want to participate or not.
Per the article, this is not being used to help the students succeed, instead it is being used to damage their grade for a lack of attendance. I think most reasonable people would agree attendance is not a reliable metric by which to base a students grade. The exception being discussion based or interactive courses like debate or public speaking.
I'd be very curious to learn about your LMS usage project. Are you saying you identified at-risk students quickly enough to intervene at a point in the term where it made a difference between passing and failing and that the school successfully intervened in those cases?
I get frustrated as a technical staff person, who personally enjoys being on the cutting edge, often being the one in meetings saying 'data is great but how will we actually use it?'.
Honestly, I'll probably retire form higher ed in a few years and go work for an outfit like yours.
What happens if they opt out?
And can they opt out of assessment by default, while still allowing data collection? That is, could the data be collected, but go into a secure archive, which only the student could access? So if the student isn't doing well, they could release selected data to advisers.
With that said, I find a particular part of your explanation more intellectually dishonest than the anal probe comment. That's not to say you're being flippant as perhaps that commenter was.
To claim that you're not using this data in terms of surveillance is utterly nonsensical. If you can demonstrate to me how you're not actively conducting surveillance, I'm open to hearing it.
Privacy trade offs may provide measurable gains, but I've yet to come across even attempts at quantifying the loss of individual privacy. You can show asymptotically improving trends, but the costs seem to remain blank, unknown, and I think that is what our flippant friend was trying to get at.
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
Students should unite and collectively uninstall the malware.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Or what am I missing?
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.
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.
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.