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Comment by ryzvonusef | Hacker News Reader

""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.

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Lets not blame tech, the root cause is the administrators are douchebags. Tracking because they can is their fault. Adding control because they can is their fault. Not doing their testing of their unneeded system? Not being responsive at the tech support level? All their fault. They neither need nor deserve the excuses and allowing them that rhetorical shield has only harmful results.

I work in higher ed. I wouldn't say admin are douchebags, they are just under pressure and responding with a solution. For various reasons schools are under pressure to increase student success which is measured by retention, persistence, graduation rates among others. These systems help "teach to the test" if you will. They are pitched in slick presentations with complex statistics with dubious claims to non-technical staff who are poorly versed but like many high-level managers, smarter than their own good.

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.

In fairness though, thinking by enforcing attendance you improve outcomes is a misreading of the data. Sure, when students attend classes, they tend to do better... when the choice to attend is without consequences. Once you make it mandatory, there's a good chance it will cease to be an effective predictor of outcomes, and it may even negatively harm outcomes (classrooms behave differently when attendance is mandated).

I think this is something that is understood by a lot of people at universities, but the overlap between these people and the people writing checks is slim.

Presumably it's the people writing checks at universities that are making the decisions though.

>Lets not blame tech, the root cause is the administrators are douchebags.

as if there aren't sales people in these tech companies pushing these kinds of products.

There is an entire industry of these kinds of soulless tech products geared towards surveiling education, and it's been that way since I was in high school even 10 years ago...

Students used to (still) take the iClickers (https://www.iclicker.com/) for other students to answer questions in large lectures.

That's likely a violation of the institution's academic honesty policy.

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.

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.

I agree. All the more reason colleges and universities ought not engage in such behavior.

> This is downside of tech, false positive and negatives

As opposed to non-tech solutions, which don't have false positive & negatives? Please.

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