- Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.
- If a tracking system can make students be better, one college adviser said, isn’t that a good thing?
- School and company officials call location monitoring a powerful booster for student success: If they know more about where students are going, they argue, they can intervene before problems arise. But some schools go even further, using systems that calculate personalized “risk scores” based on factors such as whether the student is going to the library enough.
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.
I honestly hate colleges' obsession with forcing students into a predefined role that doesn't work for so many people. The more I teach the more conflicted I feel about all the students I can't reach. I wish I had a good answer for how things ought to be done, but I do think that forced attendance isn't it.
Hate to break it to everybody but if you've got more than one wireless access point on your network, you can track peoples' locations anyway. Not really in real time, not really with any decent granularity, but I can dump the .csv out of my Unifi network and tell you when GRETAS iPHONE goes from my parking lot WAP to my lobby WAP to my lounge WAP. Does it give me GPS? Nope. Does it give me real-time intelligence? Nope. But then, neither does this stuff. SpotterEDU has two "success stories" on its page - the depressed kid who only left her dorm for meals and "Jeff Rubin taught a large lecture of over 300 students and was able to run a report a few weeks in and identify the students missing the most class." This is pretty much what it lets you do - analyze signal strength data after the fact. If they were serious they'd geofence it: security gets an alert if a student is more than 150 feet from classrooms they're attending, for example. THAT is good and Orwellian but nobody's going to bother because that means someone has to react to the data in realtime and someone has to have the responsibility of choosing to react or not react to the data. So really, all this lets 'em do is check attendance. At a community college level you can't take a class without f'n roll call. Part of it is because there are Running Start kids in there and they're minors. Part of it is because there are work programs that require attendance for the subsidies to pay out. Part of it is because now that every white male is a potential active shooter they need attendance lists to triage mass murders. And a depressing amount of it is because every bad grade is an opportunity to litigate so collegiate performance is making a hard shift from subjective to objective. I mean, that's just a shitty app. If I'm requiring you to run my app, and I'm requiring you to run my bluetooth hotspots, but I'm not required to guarantee the veracity of their handshake? get outta here.
SpotterEDU’s terms of use say its data is not guaranteed to be “accurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.”
On the other hand, when I teach I call roll the first week of class and that's about it. If you don't show up to any of those lectures, you get an email, and if you don't reply, you get dropped a couple weeks in when the university sends instructors the form for doing that. That sorts out anyone who forgot the class, misread their schedule, switched sections and didn't say, etc. Other than that, I don't really care if you show up? Quizzes happen at scheduled times and I send a note if there's an in-class activity that's graded, but that's it. And, yeah, other than the shitty bluetooth hardware, SpotterEDU is basically selling you a fancy button that pulls router logs and dumps them into a csv. Universities love that shit, though, because it is yet another expensive data aggregation tool that provosts can use to feel important.
Gawd sounds fucking glorious. The CNC program? Started at 7am. First 10 minutes were calling roll. If you weren't in the room by the time roll was finished, you lost a point. You could lose three points across a quarter without it negatively affecting your grade. And yes, students whose names began with "W" got ten extra minutes to get to class. Every.Day. At the other school attendance was also taken every day. Which gave the instructor a good fifteen minutes to argue with students about the pronunciation of their names. Every.Day. I think the more infantile the program, the more its students will be infantilized. I suspect that a 300-level OChem lecture is going to have a lot fewer of these traps than a 100-level English lecture but I also think that five years from now the 300-level OChem lecture won't be immune. Of course, the more spendy the college the less likely you are to put up with it; once you have your Team Elite membership it's all academic anyway.On the other hand, when I teach I call roll the first week of class and that's about it. I
'Good' students learn well by sitting in a large lecture and doing homework. Getting a number back on a homework assignment is sufficient feedback for students to learn from their mistakes. Every student's knowledge is equally evaluatable by exams. Student success in a class can be meaningfully categorized into a single letter grade. Students all have the appropriate prerequisite knowledge and remember it well. Students can all grasp the material at about the same rate, and certainly within one semester. Students feel comfortable talking one on one to professors or TAs during office hours. Certainly this works well enough for many students. But it absolutely does not work for many others who are otherwise bright, capable individuals. Some people have extenuating personal circumstances — family that need support, relationship troubles, kids, poverty. An increasing number of people have anxiety problems. A lot of people have not had a good pre-college education to draw on and struggle to make that up whilst 'good' students get better grades because they had a better upbringing. I think some of the best learning I've done is sitting down with a friend or two and a book and working through it at our own pace until we're satisfied we know what's going on. No exams, no answer key — we do the exercises and discuss our approaches until we agree on what 'the' answer is.
Long has it been known that standardized education mostly exists to provide a uniform experience to better mold a disparate populace into a uniform workforce. Over the past 50 years that workforce has come to require a four-year degree; as a consequence the uniformity of experience has extended to college. I dunno, man. I spent a year amongst the proletariat teens of This Modern America and fuckin' hell the amount of handholding was just appalling. People with translators following them around. People with state-mandated guidance counselors following them around. People with ADHD headbands. We've agreed as a culture that everyone gets college, we've agreed that we're all fucked without college degrees, so we've agreed as a culture that we'll do whatever it takes to get people through 180 credits come hell or high water and the whole stupid artifice is a sham. There was a time when bright, capable individuals could find something useful to do without writing 15 essays on Dickens but that time has largely passed. As a consequence we've created a patently preposterous structure to get people over the hump of education they never needed in the first place.