Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines • Hacker News Board

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#31

Post by Zenst » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 8:58 PM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #19

threatofrain wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think those informal understandings should stay so informal. If it's the fact that having your paper due by 4:20 is fine, then let it be 4:20, although the midnight deadline is likely something most people wouldn't do if they had to collect submissions in person, and so in this scenario we have automation possibly enabling more flexibility in student schedules. If students need extra room to pass the bar and…

Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion? Is it actually _better_, or does it just maximise specific metrics that you're able to easily quantify? More to the point - do you want to _be_ that person? I'm glad that my professors were human beings and not automatons - I probably wouldn't have done we…

> Do you actually want to live in this world in which every interaction that's not amongst close friends or family is necessarily bureaucractic with zero discretion?

You mean a tech companies support as many anecdote has attested over the years upon Ycombinator with cries of trying to just speak with a human and that sad trend that if you want tech-support with a human it can boil down to knowing somebody who knows somebody who works there who can humanise the issue.

With that in mind, think we are already there alas. The aspect that you get emails from companies that are donotreply and to actually reply entails reading thru numerous fineprint to find an email that will automatically process you response.

Yes the days of drive-by support are well are truly here.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#32

Post by drewg123 » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:00 PM UTC

I find it telling that they are afraid of letting students know what their bluetooth receivers look like. I know that if I was in still school and being tracked like this, I'd ether vandalize or come up with a way to jam those receivers..

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#33

Post by knzhou » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:02 PM UTC

mod50ack wrote: post #2

I'm a college student myself (my university, as far as I'm aware, has no system such as this). As far as I'm concerned, it's both an insidious creep of social-credit policy and a gross invasion of student privacy. It treats us as children rather than as the adults we are, and seems to me to be a sign of the re-infantalization of colleges. Many generations ago, when the age of majority was for the most part higher, co…

> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty.

From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cutoff, and any position of it will lead to complaints. Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff.

If you have a good reason for an extension, you can still get it. But there's no reason anybody needs, specifically, the extra second after a formal deadline. If the deadline were moved to a second after midnight, you would try to submit two seconds after midnight and complain, and so on. (I mean, why do you think deadlines are at midnight in the first place? Because in-person collection would stop working at 5 PM, leading to complaints, so deadlines were extended to midnight to let people work at night.)

This is pointless slippage, and the resolution from the student side is so easy. Just pretend every deadline is 5 minutes earlier than it actually is, and you'll never have problems.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#34

Post by whatsmyusername » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

Yeah that's incredibly creepy.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#35

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

wck0 wrote: post #13

ryzvonusef wrote: post #10

""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 presen…

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#36

Post by itronitron » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

knzhou wrote: post #33

mod50ack wrote: post #2

I'm a college student myself (my university, as far as I'm aware, has no system such as this). As far as I'm concerned, it's both an insidious creep of social-credit policy and a gross invasion of student privacy. It treats us as children rather than as the adults we are, and seems to me to be a sign of the re-infantalization of colleges. Many generations ago, when the age of majority was for the most part higher, co…

> For example, my assignments are now largely due at midnight, at a very particular second: submit a nanosecond late at your own penalty. From the instructor's point of view, there's no winning here -- there will always be a cutoff, and any position of it will lead to complaints. Even for an informal system, there's always a last person allowed in, and hence a cutoff. If you have a good reason for an extension, you c…

Slippage is never pointless but rather an important aspect for any efficient system. If you are setting the deadline at midnight instead of 4pm then you are making most of the students work longer on the assignment. Set the hard deadline to 4pm and then allow a few students to submit late. That ends up being less of a burden on students and society.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#37

Post by motohagiography » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

Real question is, what are we educating people to be?

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#38

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

> 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

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#39

Post by joe_the_user » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

dpflan wrote: post #17

> “We’re reinforcing this sense of powerlessness … when we could be asking harder questions, like: Why are we creating institutions where students don’t want to show up?” 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…

In the early 80s at several large universities I knew of, it wasn't uncommon for attendance at lectures to be effectively optional. The student was expected to do the homework, pass the midterm and final and maybe participate in discussions in a small section with a TA or graduate student.

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#40

Post by savolai » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:36 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #30

mnm1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I was lowered an entire grade in one class for not attending despite my work being of the highest quality. Attendance was not even listed as part of the grade on the syllabus so I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time. Teachers that do that should be fired. As should teachers that lose your midterm. But I doubt anyone cares about the students and the impact things like this have on…

> I was graded on something without even being told ahead of time Ever heard of a pop quiz?

That’s not the kind of unexpected situation the comment you are replying to is referring to at all. If the rules are not set in advance, they are basically arbitrary.