I can’t believe students would tolerate this:
Northern Arizona State will soon track class attendance via an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip in student ID cards. The system, which is similar to one used at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will use sensors to detect students as they enter classrooms. The data collected will be recorded and shared with professors.
Predictably, students are unhappy and, with equal predictability, have taken their discontent to Facebook via the protest group although some of the more energetic have started petitions against the proposed practice.
University officials say their aim is only to increase student attendance and improve performance though, with enough sensors, they could easily track students’ whereabouts on campus at all times. Students counter, correctly, that they are adults and whether they attend class regularly, on time or pass at all is not the university’s business.
The larger issue being overlooked is the growing use of tracking devices in the U.S., and how willing most people are to be tagged and set loose in the “wild” where their movements and spending habits are monitored, recorded and filed away for someone’s future use.
What is to stop someone from carrying the id’s of his friends? And why would anyone agree to this?
Comrade Scrutinizer
__
You mean like the Internet, where thing like Google, Facebook, et al track you all the time?
GregB
We have much better technology than this. Anal chips anyone?
Rosalita
and these jackasses try to say Obama is fascist? FFS!
August J. Pollak
The president of U. Madison clearly wants to be the mayor on FourSquare.
(“improve performance?” With what? Arriving in class before the bell rings?)
August J. Pollak
Adding… it’ll be interesting monitoring which of these policies garners more “libertarian” outrage- working-class Latinos getting pulled over and asked for papers, or upper and middle-class suburbanites getting asked for ID.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
Ooh, I know, I know! We could implant them, say in the hand or forehead! What?
Incertus (Brian)
University officials say their aim is only to increase student attendance
There’s a way to do this that doesn’t involve RFID chips–it’s called mandating that professors take attendance and put penalties on students who don’t show. It’s required of me. Mind you, I have a cap of 27 students per class (should be 24, but that’s another story) and I make it my job to know all their names as well, so it’s easier for me to do it. But then again, the classes my students complain about the most are the ones with 300 of them jammed into a giant lecture hall where they have no connection with the person doing the teaching. Want to have them show up? Make the students feel like they’re going to lose something if they don’t. Stop layering technology between the teacher and the student.
Bnut
Attendance policies are retarded and always have been. Some teacher telling you you’ll go down half a grade point because you missed more than 3 days really pissed me off. I pay my tuition. If I go to class is my business. Take my damn money and let me learn.
Walker
If your class is so large that you need RFIDs to track attendance, how in the hell is forced attendance going to improve performance?
Omnes Omnibus
@August J. Pollak: Quoi?
scav
And their laptops could take pictures of them to ensure they’re doing their homework!
Morbo
Hey kids: hit the ID with a hammer. You’re welcome.
Zifnab
Hey, so long as the RDIF chip isn’t embedded. Then you’ll upset the legislature in Georgia.
http://www.disinfo.com/2010/04/georgia-to-ban-implanting-microchips-in-people-against-their-will/
At UT, a couple of my classes had a $50 sign-in device you had to buy, so that you could “clock-in” to the class every day. Your attendance rate made up 10% of your grade. It was ridiculous and obnoxious and everyone saw it for the money grabbing, grade weed-out policy it was intended to be.
But what are you going to do? The teachers control your grades. And the grades control your future employment prospects. If Northern Arizona State wants to implement this policy, there isn’t all that much the current class can do, except maybe bad mouth the school and scare off future students.
Hunter Gathers
Let me get this strait – I give you (a university) 10,000 dollars,and in exchange, you will electronically track me, making sure that I attend the classes that I am paying thousands of dollars a year to attend?
I think I’ll take my money elsewhere, thank you very much.
K. Grant
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion: Tattoos are all the rage, why not use a nifty little bar code tattoo, or a tidy little row of numbers, no muss no fuss….Hmm, what’s that? It’s been done before? And not for the betterment of all? Okay, I guess you know best. /heavy snark
August J. Pollak
@Omnes Omnibus:
There’s an app on iPhones called FourSquare where you get points every time you “check in” to a certain location. INTERNET HUMOR AM I RITE
Walker
@Bnut:
It depends. If the class has a heavy discussion component which factors into your grade, then you have to count off for lack of attendance. But you make this clear in the grading contract at the beginning of the course. If they don’t like it, drop.
I did work at one university where I was told to forceably drop a student after 4 absences (this was university policy). The reason was because, at that school, there was a high correlation between absences and failures, and they wanted less failures on the books.
mtraven
Phase 2: subcutaneous implanting.
Wish I was joking.
Culture of Truth
It’s the heat. No human was meant to live where it gets to be 120 degrees. It’s unnatural.
Gregory
Word. Thanks to Catholic high school education, I cruised through many of my college freshman gen eds, and didn’t attend History II at all after acing the midterm as a regurgitation of junior year history class.
In fact, after Catholic high school education, it somewhat blew my mind that one could, in fact, cut class. And that was back in the ’80s — it isn’t like cutting class is some kind of newfangled phenomenon universities are only now figuring out how to deal with. If you want your students in class, give frequent quizzes, assign major points for “class participation” or just make your class interesting. This Big Brother hogwash is for the birds.
August J. Pollak
Well, obviously, the cameras in the laptops.
martha
To build on Comrade S’s point, heck, UW should just just pay Facebook and Twitter to track student location for them–a new B to B revenue stream for these companies. (OK, I want my cut for this brilliant idea…)
Kirk Spencer
@Bnut: Actually, I agree. I had a class in college three decades ago that I failed because of attendance. It was annoying because the instructor said anyone who wanted to do so could take a “pre-final” on the subject that would cover everything in the class. Obviously, he said, anyone who passed would not really need the class. I didn’t realize (freshman that I was) that despite getting 100% on that test he meant the ‘not really need’ rhetorically. The 94% and better on all ‘real’ tests to include the final also made no difference. I flunked because of having too many absences.
It had a permanent impact on my opinion of education standards and requirements.
SGEW
The Privacy/Transparency debate hasn’t even started yet. I suspect that it will be one of the most important social and cultural shifts since the Enlightenment, frankly; telecommunications and interconnectivity and the Information Age and all that jazz. I have no idea what it will wind up looking like.
I must admit that I don’t like the way things are going with RFIDs and wiretapping and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google and trackable cell phones and security cameras and googling your employees/dates and etc.. I honestly can’t tell if it’s because I’m a civil rights semi-purist, or if I’m just getting old (and I’m only in my early thirties!).
I’m very curious to see how freshmen at Northern Arizona State will think about this.
Culture of Truth
They’d never get away with this at the University of Phoenix!
Omnes Omnibus
@August J. Pollak: As far as I know, UW-Madison is not using the chip in their IDs for anything other than allowing after hour access to University buildings or allowing access to restricted labs. My wife is currently a grad student at the university and serves as my source for this info.
The Moar You Know
Arizona: a petri dish full of fascism.
The rest of us are not far behind; most of our fellow citizens buy the myth that such things “make us safer”. In the coming years, you will be stunned at what people are willing to put up with to “be safe”.
Mark
As someone whose bread-and-butter was skipping class in college, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to mandate attendance. Students have all kinds of reasons that they might not be there – illness, family issues, vacation, volunteering, hungover, or, as is most common in engineering, the professor is simply writing the textbook verbatim on the board.
I realize that academic freedom allows a professor to use any stupid grading scheme they want, but honestly, anything more than a project/term paper and a final is just generating busywork and taking the responsibility for learning out of the hands of your students.
Walker
@Kirk Spencer:
Was he unclear on his grading contract the first week of class? Because if so, that is clearly his fault. You should never, ever break your grading contract (even if it gives a student a higher grade than you think he/she deserves).
TomG
5 – August, there is already a fair amount of libertarian outrage over the Arizona law, I’ve linked 2 topics from one blog alone about this last week. Yes, several libertarians rightly see that law as restricting the right of employers to hire who they want, and the right of private property owners to allow on their property anyone they want to. Yes, the racism inherent in that law is noted and criticized.
I’m sure that a state-run college making this requirement of ID for attendance will get criticism too, once word spreads.
Which topic gets more attention will depend on which blog you look at.
I’ve said before, there are many more libertarians blogging than you seem to notice. And not all of them are “glib”.
Niques
@Gregory:
This!
DA
Huh, I’m a med student at Wisconsin-Madison and am not familiar with any such practice. That article links to a Badger Herald piece talking about Madison, which doesn’t mention our ID cards, but rather the electronic clickers you can pick up at the start of class and are sometimes used to answer questions. That’s really not the same thing.
Cerberus
And it would never ever ever be used to notice say which students were in which bedrooms, just like cameras in laptops most definitely never managed to catch a picture of that “sassy cheerleader” stripping.
And yeah, what others said. Worried about attendance, make roll call mandatory. Have 300+ sized classes? Maybe you shouldn’t have spent all the money on law-enforcement cracking down on latin@s and tax cuts for conservative retirees instead of higher education, you fucks.
Hell, the supposed “problem” they highlight is so easy to fix unobtrusively and without error (like no card will possibly fail to trigger a response noting their attendance or at least a student won’t claim that if they didn’t attend) simply by having a roll call, that it’s highly unlikely that the secondary concerns aren’t their real goals (the invasion of privacy and the chance to get electronic dirt on impressionable kids).
And yeah, it’s also idiotic. Sometimes adult people need to skip classes and part of learning is learning how to take control of your own schedule without fucking yourself over. If you’re sick and you do everyone else a favor by staying home and having a buddy take notes for you, that shouldn’t count against you, especially in a 300+ lecture class where you aren’t called on to participate in any meaningful way.
Mark
@Kirk Spencer – that sucks. I’m thankful I never experienced that.
As a freshman in college, we were allowed to challenge the final exam for any class before we took it. If you passed, sometimes the class didn’t appear on your transcript and you could take something else instead, and sometimes you had to take the grade you got on the exam – but didn’t need to pick up an extra class if you didn’t want to.
It would be nice to think that it was the university realizing that not everyone needed to take all of the core…But they were really trying to cut the workload for the freshman professors…
slippy
I’m just stunned that this isn’t a high school or elementary school. The authoritarian control-freak parents would be lining up to have their kids chipped.
Everyone else would be pissed.
Walker
@Mark:
I am assuming this is hyperbole, but even so, statements like this do not help your cause.
Suppose I do not have a lecture-based class. Suppose that it is a seminar style class where the entire class is student presentations with directed questions and critiques from myself and the rest of the class? By your criteria, this is just busywork, despite the fact that we have pedagogical research showing what an effect form of teaching this is.
Culture of Truth
They’re only preparing kids for the corporate world.
Kirk Spencer
@Walker: 30 years of hindsight tells me a lot I wish I’d known then.
It wasn’t in his grading policy, but it was in the college’s policy. He was being sarcastic in his statement.
At an alumni gathering I learned his intent for the pre-test was twofold. First, it was to identify the baseline understanding of the class. If the majority of the class had already read many of the books (World Lit class) he’d have been able to go deep. Second, it created a check for knowing if he was teaching well. If he confused the students who had already read, he was doing something wrong.
He just didn’t explain that very well at all at the time, and I didn’t know about the college attendance requirement. So… F.
YellowJournalism
I wonder what special accomodations regarding attendance will be made for athletes. Of course, the university will keep it fair.
This is the kind of thing that would have kept me as far away as possible from having a college experience like that. I failed one class in college from not attending enough to know the material for finals. I needed to fail that class, because it helped me get my act together and reset my priorities and career goals. Of course, I also skipped classes before that because the courses weren’t really the type that needed me to be there, just to study the syllabus and the materials very well. In those cases, maybe a review of the instructor and class structure would be more appropriate than microchipping your students.
This kind of new policy screams to me of helicopter parents who want to make sure their pwecious little one goes to class. I wonder how much pressure the university is getting to show results. It’s almost like the universities that are practically promising students a dream job straight out of college.
twiffer
@Zifnab: sure there is. get a large group together. fill one kid’s backpack with as many IDs as you can. have only that one kid go to class. demonstrate the ridiculousness of the proposal.
Michael D.
OMGWHATIFANILLEGALALIENGETSONE?? !!
theflax
@Bnut: “Retarded” is a bit strong–but, as a professor, I have a lax attendance policy and I’m upfront about it. Of course, if you don’t show up for my classes, you probably won’t pass the final and you’ll likely miss assignments. Point is, I don’t have to penalize for poor attendance–the students who don’t show up will earn lower grades on their own!
Randy P
I remember reading about a similar idea tried at a computer manufacturer years ago (I think it was Digital Equipment Corp, but I could be wrong). You could go into the computer system and query it for the current whereabouts of any employee.
Didn’t take long for employees to start leaving their badges in their desk to defeat the system. The experiment was finally halted.
The most obvious danger in this system is that it isn’t restricted to “is X in class or not”. I’m sure somebody’s eyes in campus security lit up at the prospect of learning which underaged students are visiting bars, or tracking the sexual, er, comings and goings of the student, er, body.
Corner Stone
It’s no worse than the security cameras placed in classrooms in the UK and places like Biloxi here in the states. They prepare the children for authoritarian overreach and make it as natural as breathing.
Ash Can
Wait, what? Attendance? In college? Who the fuck tracks attendance in college?
Here’s a hell of an idea: Don’t admit students likely to fail in the first place. Here’s another one: Students who demonstrate that they have learned what the course has taught get decent grades. Seriously, how fucking difficult is this?
Maybe it was just the schools I attended, but the idea of tracking attendance would have been laughed off the campus, mainly because we all knew that nonattendance would result in failure, and we all dreaded failure. It would never have occurred to me to treat college-level students otherwise. You pay your tuition, and the rest is up to the student. A high failure rate is due to one of two things: either there’s a problem with the instructor(s), or there’s a problem with the admissions policy.
Never mind the big-brother issue — this is one fucked-up school policy.
Zifnab
@twiffer: Nonsense. You know what the administrator will see? Full attendance. You know what the administrator will conclude? The policy works brilliantly!
This is a way to circumvent the rule, but it doesn’t really demonstrate anything. Unless you proceed to announce, “Hey – we cheated the system” very publicly. At which point, the administration drops the hammer on the outspoken individuals as punishment for making them look bad. And then it’s back to business as usual.
Comrade Dread
I had no idea Arizona was so full of authoritarian douchebags.
I mean, I guess I should have guessed since they kept sending Sheriff Joe back every election cycle.
But did the entire state recently go off their medication or something?
SpotWeld
Wow… I really can’t beleive the professors are going to stand for this.
It’s pretty obvious that the admins suspect that the attendence counts by the profs/TAs are not reliable, so are setting up this system so they can make attendence numbers another metric by which to rank classes.
So instead of focusing on quality of education, they go for the easy measurables that mean very little in terms of actual value.
I also find the idea of having a student’s ID number readable by a passerby very unsettling. A guy with a laptop in a coffeeshop could read someone’s ID. Cross-reference that against the school’s directory (which would be online) and from there all sorts of creepy social engineering could go on.
Kirk Spencer
@twiffer: Counterpoint comes if the ID is used for other things.
For example, if your locks in dorms and other buildings are electronic and need to scan the card, you’re kinda hurting.
If you need an ID to get something — say, meals or goodies, or access to equipment in rec areas, or just about anything else — you’re stuck till you get the ID back.
If the ID is used in conjunction with panic boxes (press the button, scan looks to see who is near for police followup), you just kinda hope you don’t need the panic box.
If the parking lot for your car needs an ID to exit or enter, if riding mass transit requires your ID for use or discount, you are kinda out of luck till your friend returns your ID card.
Bluntly, I’m of two minds about the RFID ID card. In the end I suppose it’s like just about every other technology — it’s not the tech, it’s the way it’s going to be used that’s of concern; and the use can be good or ill.
Ella in NM
The rate with which I lost my student ID would render this adorable form of Big Brotherism useless.
Walker
@Kirk Spencer:
In my book (speaking as faculty at a top-ranked engineering school), that makes it his fault.
dougie
LEAVE UW-MADISON ALOOOOOOONE!
Seriously, I am UW student and no, the NAU RFID tracking system is nothing like any “system” here. From the Badger Herald article it was fabricated from,
This exists in a vanishingly small number of classrooms. Just a few of the large lecture halls in newer buildings have little mickey mouse polling “clickers” for audience interaction, and in rare instances, taking attendance.
Now excuse me while I skip class to go drink beer at the Union Terrace. /thumb-nose
EEH
@Culture of Truth: NAU (it’s University, btw, not State) is in Flagstaff, 7,000 feet up in the mountains. Temps do not get that high and it’s one of the reasons I went there instead of ASU or UofA.
Walker
@dougie:
Ah, the clicker fad. They sure make big-lecture professors feel good. But are there any students that actually like these things?
eponymous
Something else that hasn’t been mentioned yet – in some institutions (such as mine – I teach at a community college), tracking attendence is necessary as a condition for financial aid (not sure if this is a federal law or one mandated by the states). As others have mentioned, there no need to resort to RFID if professors have to keep attendence for this.
If students aren’t attending on a regular basis, then that information gets sent to the financial aid folks and they can make the determination whether the student continues to receive financial aid or not. Potentially getting dropped from a course and losing financial aid seems to work as a motivator for some students.
Zifnab
@Ash Can:
So less RFIDs, more professional fortune tellers.
Schools are rated in relation to each other, and one way for school A to outperform school B is to have a higher graduation rate. A school filled with first year drop outs, or one that produces legions of the unemployed, is generally to be avoided. If administrators think they can institute a policy that will improve the graduation rate, it benefits the school to implement said policy.
(Of course, you don’t want TOO MANY people graduating, because then your college looks too easy – which is why we’ve got weed out courses :-p Oh the webs we weave.)
But yes. The idea isn’t to determine which students are doing well. It’s to improve learning. Whether this will be effective is another question entirely, but it is worth distinguishing as a goal.
EEH
@Comrade Dread: I had no idea, either. I guess it’s a good thing that I packed up my bags and moved out of the state 24 years ago. There are times, though, that I don’t think Colorado is much better.
dougie
@Walker:
I’ve never had a prof use them. Even academics are too self aware for something that gimmicky. Occasionally I’ve had instructors take attendance before, but that’s not exactly a novel practice.
Kirk Spencer
@Walker: [shrug] Probably so. On the other hand, I still graduated, got a job, went on to get a master’s degree. I also learned to pay VERY good attention to not only the immediate document but all referenced documents, and finally learned “if it’s not in writing it doesn’t count.”
It could have hurt me, and in some respects DID hurt me. But overall, it didn’t. As a result, I’ve no interest in assigning “fault”.
Zifnab
@Walker:
I don’t think anyone seriously objected to the clickers on their own merits. But shelling out $30-$50 per clicker, and then being told they can’t be resold… That was some serious bullshit.
Vishnu Schizt
no time to read all comments so someone may have addressed this but this fact that a college is trying to increase class attendance is utter bullshit. You fucking pay to go there. If you don’t want to attend class that is your business. If you turned in all assignments and took all tests and EARNED and passing grade, who gives a shit if you never attended one goddamn class.
I went to Arizona State (keep the jokes to yourself, I also went to NCSU for grad school and they party just as much there so STFU), and know of one chemical engineering major, who seldomly attended class, partied the night before tests, just read the text book and sometimes other students notes and had a 4.0 gpa.
That wasn’t the case for me as I battled like a mofo to a B+ average in engineering.
Ripley
Arizona, Fuck No!
Shade Tail
If they really try RFID chips in their ID cards, then the students should cook it in a microwave for several minutes or smash it with a hammer. Disable the chip and still keep your picture ID. That might also demagnetize it if it has a MAG strip on the back, but I would consider that a small price to pay for the return of privacy.
IrishGirl
Not to excuse the practice, but….I worked as professor for a private university with about 30 locations worldwide. In our AZ location students were issued cards to swipe thru readers to indicate their presence in class. The reason given was that the Federal Govt was coming down hard on universities receiving federal money. The Feds wanted to make sure we weren’t padding student numbers (funding being linked to students actively attending class). It made sense to me and since it was only a swipe as they came into class (which they could easily get around by swiping and leaving or having a friend swipe for them). I never paid attention to the attendance record produced UNLESS a student was in trouble academically. In which case I would approach the student early as possible in the term and focus extra resources to help them catch up or advise them to withdraw to save themselves some money.
I am firmly against the idea of “tracking them all the time, everywhere”. And since they don’t mention federal funding as a reason, it must not be an issue with NAU, a public university. You’re right though…AZ is a hotbed of reactionary nutjobs. I feel like I’m living in a 3rd world theocracy. Calgon, take me away!!!!!!!!!!
Comrade Dread
@EEH:
Yeah, you’ve got Bachmann up there, don’t you?
Well, at least the crazy seems to still be localized to her and the anarchist paradise of Galt’s Gulch (aka Colorado Springs).
DA
@dougie:
The clickers are used fairly frequently over at the HSLC (and I think they’re kind of fun), but yes, in any case, they really aren’t anything like the N. Arizona State system.
Martin
We use the clickers quite successfully. I won’t say the students love them, but they really do help address certain kinds of problems. We use one vendor, so the clicker is good for a student’s full 4 years. As more classes use them, the utility cost of the clicker goes down pretty fast. If you have 3 courses per year, you’ll have paid $3 per course.
We do some attendance, but the main use is equal parts instant quizzes and administrative functions. We can ask the class how many want a review session and then give them some options to vote on, stuff like that.
@Vishnu Schizt: So when we crank up course grading on the assumption that people attend and 50% of the class fails, can you stand outside our offices and head off all the students coming up to complain and bargain? It sounds all very libertariany and shit, but when you’ve got 1,000 students mobbing in your lobby, the libertarian line won’t cut it.
And from the perspective of a public university, you didn’t pay to go there – not entirely. The state is subsidizing your education and some student got turned away so that you could come. I think the taxpayers, and the students that didn’t get to attend would appreciate that you come to class.
GVG
I think its a GREAT idea. Of course I work for a very large University and a major portion of my job is figuring out which students that received Federal Aid (most of them) never attended a day of classes. The government considers this fraud. You take their money to be a student then you are supposed to do student things like go to classes. Turning in homework, participating in lectures or taking tests also count, but take thousands in Federal money and do nothing….is fraud. In a large university with sometimes very large lecture hall classes, it can be difficult to find out and document, who just failed a class and who skipped the class. If you have over 100 students in a class, it takes a professor a significant part of the class time to read off the roll call. They can’t and won’t do it with good reason. Electronic sign in automatically is something I have actually proposed. Yes, it can be fooled with deliberately I think, but most of these “walkaways” are actually not planned, they just “happen” usually with a good dose of self delusion. At any rate, in order to keep the schools from indifference to Fed losses, the rules actually say the school pays the Fed back, and then tries to collect from the student. That payback money comes from aid funds that would otherwise be given out to other honest students the next semester.
Like anything, it could go too far. Obviously its something to think about carefully, design careful rules and have transparent oversight, but in and of itself, I think its needed. If you can make an A without going to class, fine, but most people can’t and you don’t make A’s unless you take tests which counts as “going to class” even if it may not be as often as the professor wants.
Very few students these days pay tuition out of pocket. they have financial aid from multiple sources Federal, State, College and private: and all those sources want them to actually go to classes. In addition at a state University like mine, the “tuition” cost is actually subsidized by the state and the student is only paying about 1/3 of the “real” cost.
Ash Can
@Zifnab: It doesn’t take a fortune teller to figure out that a high school senior with a strong record, high test scores, solid recommendations, and a good presentation on the application is likely to graduate. As for weeding out the borderline students, hey, it’s the admissions office’s job to do that.
Citizen Alan
When I was in law school, the only teacher who ever seriously worried about attendance after the first year (1L’s had their attendance checked until all the flakes and screwups eliminated themselves) was the jackass who taught Civil Procedure II and who would auto-fail anyone who missed more than three times. He instituted that policy after a guy went to the first class, realized the professor was an annoying idiot, skipped every single class until exam day, and then got the highest grade in the class. Of course, it helped that said students father had previously taught that same class before his retirement and the student had been helping his father write a Civ Pro textbook before he even got into law school.
So when I was compelled to take Civ Pro II from said jackass, I came every single day, sat on the back row and caught up on my reading for other classes while studiously ignoring the jackass professor, and in the last two weeks of school, I taught myself the subject from a box of used flash cards. I got a 3.5.
Long story short — an attendance policy for college students in any lecture class is demeaning and stupid.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject — forget about students who carry in the IDs of other students, what about students who show up but leave their IDs at home? Are you counted as absent if you forget your ID badge?
Ash Can
@GVG: OK, now that makes sense to me.
Omnes Omnibus
@Citizen Alan: We had required attendance with no more than 4 absences allowed before a grade could be lowered. The only classes where this was taken seriously were the first year courses and the courses like Professional Responsibility that were required for graduation.
Seitz
@Kirk Spencer:
I don’t know what class this was or the dynamics of the lectures/presentations, but I can envision classes where attendance is important even if an individual student doesn’t believe it’s important for that particular student. I had plenty of classes in undergrad, even lectures, that were very participatory, and we learned not only from the professor, but other students as well. In instances like those, it’s almost more important for the more knowledgeable students to attend regularly.
I’m not casting aspersions, but it makes me wonder why you stayed in a class where you didn’t stand to learn anything. Why do it other than for the easy grade (not that I wouldn’t have done the same thing at that age)? If you’re philosophy is that an undergraduate education is basically cash in exchange for a piece of paper, I guess that’s fine, but my advice would have been to stay out of classes with an attendance policy. Personally, I’d rather have professor tell me that there’s a bright line attendance rule instead of saying “participation” is, say, 10% of the grade or something. That’s purely at the professor’s whim, which I think is unfair. But I’m told that attendance counts, and I choose not to show up, it’s my own damn fault. Shame on the professor if he didn’t make the policy clear at the beginning of the quarter/semester.
Seitz
@Culture of Truth:
NAU is in Flagstaff. The average high temperature in Flagstaff in the summer is around 80 degrees. It’s like around 7,000 feet above sea level.
kommrade reproductive vigor
If I were a student at a college that used this system my only problem would be getting my friends to agree on which practical joke to implement first. Burying a bunch of ID cards in the Dean’s back yard right before a long break? Massive card swap day?
The possiblities for giving people a headache are endless.
Brazil is Big
Reading through I’m surpised no one has mentioned a pretty easy way to up the attendance in university classes- make them interesting!
I’m a professor at a large state university and while my classes are on the smaller side (28-32 students), I rarely have any studen over two absences a semester. My classes are highly engaging, with lots of discussion and student participation and students seem to actually enjoy coming to class.
But, once again instead of looking at the cause of why something is ocurring we will immediately go for the most reactionary decision possible.
EEH
@Comrade Dread: Bachmann is from Minnesota. We did have Marilyn Musgrave until she was defeated in the last election and we are saddled with Tom Tancredo who regularly shoots his mouth off about stuff.
Galt’s Gulch is just about right when it comes to Colorado Springs. There’s a lot of crazy down there.
Seitz
While not exactly the same as this, and I’m certainly not defending the University’s stated goal, I’ll bet that many of us are subject to this kind of “tracking” almost every day. I can’t get into my office without swiping a key card in the lobby of my office building. Trust me, that information is collected and stored. It’s not just the turnstile verifying that I’m authorized.
I don’t think that information is shared with my employer, and honestly I don’t care if it is because there are plenty of legitimate reasons for me to be out of the office, but still, there’s a record of what time I enter the office every day, and on night’s and weekends, it records the floor on which I got off.
ChockFullO'Nuts
Haven’t read the thread, but I just spent 15 years being tracked at work on a big campus. Never gave it much of a thought, really.
I don’t know why it’s a big deal. Who gives a shit if the administration can figure out when I was in a building or a classroom?
The only time I ever saw it used in any non-ordinary way was when we had a guy living in his office. They were able to prove that he was, and he got himself fired over it. We were all pretty relieved, because he was scaring the hell out of people.
Josh
Seitz, Thanks. I mean, geez, where would Western Civilization be if no one had attended the Symposium? I’ve seen students go ballistic when their late arrivals or absences were questioned: “You can’t say that to me! I pay your salary!” and my only reaction was to hope they pull that on a police officer.
ChockFullO'Nuts
@ChockFullO’Nuts:
Oh, and nice try at the gratuitous Arizona bash, though, especially since the damned thing apparently was developed in Wisconsin. Of course, we know how evil Wisconsin is. Cheese, and all.
( rolls eyes )
What next, John, are you going to discover that people jaywalk in Arizona? They do … but only toward the right.
Or, to avoid people who just ate Mexican food.
me
I can imagine that people would be upset with the big brotherishness of it, on the other hand, when I was at UW, I skipped class so much…
wlrube
People never seem to really understand the effects of expanding the reach of higher and higher levels of education to more and more people. If you go back to fairly recently in our history, most people didn’t even have to graduate from high school, let alone college. The greater the percentage of the population that goes to college, the stupider and less motivated the overall college population will be, and the more college administrators will find this sort of thing necessary. I think it’s a travesty that colleges are insulting their students with measures like this, but only if it’s also a travesty that even the most apathetic dunce of a student needs a college degree to get a decent job these days.
This is why people are paying so much attention to the U.S. News college rankings and similar nonsense — now that any idiot has a bachelor’s, the only way to impress people with yours is to get them oohing and aahing over what a prestigious school you got it from. We really need a formally stratified education system with an academic college track and a vocational education track starting around high school. Otherwise, U.S. News and the rest of the college rankers will end up like credit rating agencies but with even less regulation.
Gunner Billy K
@The Moar You Know:
I grew up in Arizona. Graduated form Northern Arizona University. I couldn’t wait to move from Arizona to the comparatively liberal Texas. True story.
The weird thing is, NAU is a VERY liberal school. Buncha hippies and future teachers and musicians up there. Trust me, this is going nowhere.
Kirk Spencer
@Seitz: I “stayed” because it was a mandatory class for graduation. As in (paraphrase), “all students will take the following core classes.”
While I’ll not name it here, this was a SMALL college with decent educational standards. My graduating class was 142 students. The options available were relatively limited in comparison to most universities.
I will also repeat that it was over 30 years ago.
Finally, “if I knew then what I know now” I’d not have missed the majority of classes. I’d have learned nothing beyond tolerance for others stumbling through reading the books aloud (yes, despite being homework that filled the majority of the class each day I attended). But I still should not have skipped.
Irish Girl
@Brazil is Big
Let me guess, you teach a Humanities subject? English Lit, Sociology, Psychology…….I taught Computer Programming Courses AND some classes in the Humanities (I’m qualified for both, weird yes, I know). However, making computer programming “interesting” is incredibly hard. Our classes were as hands on as we could get them requiring attendance, participation and a graded product at the end. But being interactive and interesting in technical subjects is infinitely harder with such subjects. Now when I taught Ethics and Sociology, it was a breeze. So don’t go around preaching about “students don’t come to your class because it isn’t interesting”…..That attitude teaches college students that it’s their job to be entertained….instead of the really important life lesson that their main job is to learn, regardless of whether it is “interesting” or not.
YellowJournalism
@wlrube:
You’re right! How can I trust Playboy’s list of the top ten party schools if it’s not regulated?
Randy P
@Seitz: I mostly attended my classes, but there was one computer science class that I pretty much skipped. It was actually good material that has stood me in good stead through my entire career, but the instructor was teaching from the manuscript of his own book, and I learned that there was not a single thing happening in lecture that deviated from the text.
I aced the homework and the tests and he grudgingly gave me my A.
In retrospect I realize I was an idiot and he could have flunked me. But I actually didn’t know that.
David in NY
I go to meetings and sign in sometimes. I use a pen, and there’s a piece of paper to use it on. If they want to know who’s there, I don’t see why this, and three or four clipboards, wouldn’t just do the trick. No privacy problems there.
Jager
@Incertus (Brian):
I had two classes back to back my freshman year in college, A European history class held in a lecture hall with about 150 students, a huge stage, dim lights and a professor with a middle european accent, making him hard to understand, he spoke at a whisper level and stayed off mic. (seemingly on purpose) Most of us either cut it or slept. The next hour I had a lively Philosophy 101 class with around 20 students led by a brilliant senior prof who loved to teach this introductory course to what he called, “the ignorant but unpolluted, untainted and in some cases, unwashed future of America, Africa, India, various Asian countries and Europe, I believe I am up to the challenge of this frightening undertaking, are you?” There were members of that class that would show up 10 minutes after being involved in a 3 car accident. I never missed a minute…it was what going to college should be about!
JGabriel
Whoa, 90 responses, and not one joke regarding, oh, say, how National Geographic’s monitoring and photography in its special on the mating rituals of the wild Alabama teabagger wouldn’t have been possible without the latest RFID and tagging technologies – secretly implanted via the plumage they collect in their natural environment, Walmart(tm)?
C’mon, people, step up to the plate.
.
BombIranForChrist
Another aspect of this is that it’s easy to circumvent. With social networking the way it is, I can imagine some enterprising students coming up with quick and easy ways to create a system where there will be Mules who will basically carry around other students cards so that the students are registered as attending class.
So not only would this system turn out to be unpopular, it would also turn out to be ineffective when the administration sees that a class that clearly only has 50% of the people in it is showing up as 90% full.
Money down the drain, students pissed, prospective students scared off … I dunno … I definitely feel for professors who have a hard time figuring out if 100+ students are actually attending their class, but I am not sure this is even the most efficient answer, regardless of any Big Brother issues.
Mark
@Walker
What can I say? I have a MS in electrical engineering from Berkeley. You’ve got some amazing faculty there, but I never saw anything even remotely like that in six years of post-secondary education. 100% lecture classes, some televised, along with the occasional lab that the prof never attended and was tangential to the course material anyways.
I’ll amend my original statement: if you’re teaching a lecture class, you need to give the students the freedom to learn. If a guy can skip every class but ace the final (and there were always people putting that to the test), then weekly quizzes for a grade are busy work.
geg6
Well, to be real for a minute here, the University does have an interest in making sure students attend class due to federal financial aid regulations.
Students who receive all “Fs” or who are determined to not have attended enough classes to pass will have their aid adjusted to reflect actual success and attendance, per federal aid laws. The University must return the federal funds received from that student and it is then up to the University to collect the funds from the student, whether or not the student still attends the University.
If we know before these reviews are required to be done each semester, we can cancel the student from that class or classes, thus lowering costs to both the University and the students who will pay higher prices because of lazy, stupid, selfish students who think they know the subject matter better than the faculty, who think college is like high school and they can get away with As regardless of performance and attendance, and/or who are trying to game the student aid system and get a bunch of money they don’t deserve.
Comrade Dread
I’m thinking liberal and conservative aren’t really great terms to describe people’s politics anymore. I think we need to start distinguishing between authoritarians vs. DFHs.
@EEH
Whoops, for some reason, I associated Bachmann as representing Galt’s Gulch.
I apologize to Colorado and all of its residents for blaming you for electing her.
twiffer
@Zifnab: offer free pizza and you can get at least 2K students on board. involve enough students and the student government and you make any retaliation by the admin look even worse. it could happen. you do need enough participants to a) make the attendence for any particular class wildly disproportionate; and b) any attempts at punative retaliation a bigger headache.
geg6
Man, I didn’t originally read the whole thread at first. Now that I have, wow. Buncha students, once-upon-a-time students, and faculty who have no idea what they’re talking about. Shocking.
Now, I’m not necessarily saying putting chips in ID cards is the way to go (but don’t really see a problem with it either). But faculty are too lazy and entitled to do such be expected to do such mundane things as take attendance so that their schools can keep their Title IV funding and students are at least 1000X more lazy and entitled and 2000X less informed.
sneezy
@Culture of Truth:
“It’s the heat.”
NAU is in Flagstaff, at almost 7,000 feet above sea level.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@Brazil is Big: Let’s not get radical.
Seriously, when I first went to college I was terrified of getting kicked out so I went to all of my classes, even the early morning one.
Then I realized my early morning class (the one I needed for my major) consisted of the prof reading from the book. Word. For. Word. And she wasn’t too hot at answering questions on the fly. Since I know how to read I soon decided I could have my own private class. Outside. Or in my room. Or anywhere not in a stuffy room listening to someone drone on. Watching classmates struggle to stay awake only entertains for so long.
JGabriel
Comrade Dread:
To be fair, Minnesota, the only state that has gone Dem in the last 12 elections, isn’t exactly the first place one thinks of as the home of elected wingnuts.
.
Church Lady
Some of my kids teachers have mandatory attendence politices and both kids (two different schools) were required to puchase some sort of gizmo called a “clicker” that they had to use on entry to their class to verify that they were there. How exactly it worked is beyond me, and whether the system could be gamed, I don’t know. I would imagine they could have passed it off to a friend in the same class to check them in and then skipped.
Martin
@Church Lady: It’s basically a remote control that sends a code (usually your student ID or equivalent) along with the button you’ve selected. A receiver+computer in the room takes all of these results and will provide an instant feedback on the screen, if you so desire, or just save the results to be used later.
For attendance, it just saves the presses. For quizzes, the instructor usually then puts the results of the quiz on the screen a moment after everyone punches in their answer and then reviews why the right answer was right.
The reason you don’t loan your clicker to your friend for attendance is then your friend is also taking your quizzes for you. If there’s a grade attached, students don’t usually have that kind of trust in their friends, and if they get caught, both students get an F.
asiangrrlMN
@Corner Stone: You stole my thought. The generation after mine (which would be Y) has been taught that Big Brother is always watching, and hey, it’s neato! I am hopeful that this is slowly starting to change, but this idea seems a logical outcome of all the creeping authoritarianism that has been burgeoning (yes, creeping AND burgeoning at the same time!) in the past decade or so.
In college, I skipped my bio class every day after I realized that the prof intended to read the textbook to us every day. I can do that myself! I still passed the damn class.
@Culture of Truth: OK, now that’s just fucking hilarious.
asiangrrlMN
@JGabriel: Well, except for governor. We have this odd tick that exempts us from voting for a Democrat for the highest fucking state office.
mantis
This is very weird. I’ve been part of similar discussions at a different university (where I work), but the focus was on emergency response capabilities. After the Virginia Tech mass murders, the feds imposed a rather lengthy list of requirements for university crisis response plans, among which there were recommendations for pursuing the ability to identify who is in what building at any given time. We discussed the option of RFID tracking in IDs, but that was rejected as an imposition on student privacy (I was among the majority against the idea). We are still toying with the idea of requiring professors to have RFID on them while on campus, but that hasn’t really gone anywhere. In the end we are relying on less accurate but also less intrusive measures (residency records, course rosters, etc.) for emergency response in the event that we need lists of people present at a given location.
The idea of using RFID to encourage or enforce class attendance is just absurd.
Nylund
So if you forget to take your ID to class, do you get punished?
lyn
I used to teach at at an university with smallish classes and attendance requirements. I hated them. I don’t like having students in the class only because they’re required to be there. Frat boys would sit in the back row and read newspapers and otherwise display their resentment. Now I’m at a university (overseas) in which attendance requirements are *illegal* — it’s considered giving credit for ‘time-serving.’ We also have big lectures so taking attendance isn’t practical anyway. With the exception of the 10% or so of students who never intend to show up, ever, almost all attend every lecture — I make them interesting and I tie assessment to what happens in lecture. Students make up their minds about whether to attend or not — they are adults.
ChockFullO'Nuts
What would be the point? We are all already on camera, being video captured, most of the time that we are moving around in public. Our celphones are leaving behind a trail of location-specific exchanges with cel towers. Surveillance is the rule, not the exception, most everywhere we go. All of our electronic transactions are leaving an audit trail behind. Modern day detective techniques can piece together these bits of information and pretty well track anyone who is not living off the grid.
Again, what is the big deal about the NAU initiative? It’s pretty ordinary stuff as far as I can see.
Are there still people today who venture into the connected world and have an expectation of privacy?
Seriously?
mai naem
Its Northern Arizona University. Not Northern Arizona State Uni. Also too, the nickname for NAU is Northern Alcoholics University.
Ally
@Omnes Omnibus:
I am also a UW Madison student and as far as I know, they don’t use our IDs to track class attendance. I’ve only ever had one professor take attendance in lecture, and it was indeed ridiculous. She didn’t put lecture material on the exams – in fact, there were no exams. All we had to do was write papers, so attending lecture literally was a waste of time. I guess she felt she had to validate her own content by saying that if we missed more than 5 lectures, we would fail the class. If missing lecture means students won’t do well in the class, then they (for the most part) will attend. If lectures are useless and attending them is a waste of time, students will not attend. Make it so your lectures are relevant and useful, and students will attend. PS: From the abovementioned class, I was counted absent 4 times and still got an AB in the class. Imagine.
The RFID tags in our IDs are indeed for building access only – the residents use them to get into the dorms and the dorm computer labs and employees use them for general building access.