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

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#51

Post by blihp » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #21

t34543 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does attendance matter?

That's where you learn the material? 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…

Attendance is irrelevant to most of your points:

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#52

Post by droithomme » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

> 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? Qua…

Many of the colleges that use this are third rate colleges that aren't going to have too many "creators, entrepreneurs and groundbreaking scientists". The creator of the app is a guy who has a restraining order because of violent threats he made against a school he was kicked out of as coach. Based on his history that the article touches on, it seems possible he's a controlling authoritarian sociopath. Why anyone would roll out his system, based on a desire to control and manipulate others, well it's because they're a third rate college that doesn't have a lot of good ideas about academics, that's why.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#53

Post by threatofrain » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:57 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…

We could speak the same way about police to make it obvious why some people don’t like the double edge of discretion. Isn’t it such a burden that police have to wear cameras? It’s probably much harder to exercise any executive discretion that way, let alone have any natural conversation, especially when people may demand lawsuits and firings over such footage. Must police be very equally kind to both white and black kids, like in some politically correct universe?

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...

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#54

Post by sansnomme » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #48

> the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day. I already turned off the bluetooth on my phone. I guess I should turn off the wifi when I'm not home, too.

Unless they are doing deep packet inspection or analyzing your browser through a wifi login portal, I think an iPhone's MAC randomization should be able to defeat WiFi-based tracking (barring WiFi-as-radar, those are much more difficult to evade, there is a ton of metadata you can collect from stuff like breathing, gait and heart rate etc. Cross reference with CCTV to prevent false positives.).

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#55

Post by clubm8 » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

The problem is many classes don't require attendance, especially the sort obsessed with making sure athletes are present as mentioned.

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#56

Post by Hextinium » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

knzhou wrote: post #41

itronitron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not any different. Now how late are you allowed to submit? 5 PM? Sometime at night? Midnight? How many people are allowed to submit late? What if word gets out that everybody is allowed to? You get the exact same problem, except that more of the professor and TA’s time is wasted, and the whole process now has favoritism baked in. I have seen deadlines wrap all the way around a 24 hour cycle in this way. 5 PM i…

The only rebuttal to this that has been effective to a class is: if you see it at the day you ignore the time expecting it to be at 11:59PM. If I put it at 7 AM (to give you the whole night) the next day then you think it will be due at the end of the day so it is staying at 11:59PM.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#57

Post by cvwright » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:02 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…

The way it works in my courses is, there’s a hard deadline (usually 10pm) for getting full credit.

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%.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#58

Post by vector_spaces » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

I'm 32 years old, going back to school part time to finish up my degree. I'm paying tuition fully out of pocket. Thankfully my school doesn't seem to be doing this yet, but if they did, there's absolutely no way I would tolerate them surveilling me and treating me like a child like this

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#59

Post by novok » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:04 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…

What it really means you have to have a policy that sounds more humanistic, but in the end is the same as a hard deadline:

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.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#60

Post by QuesnayJr » Wed, Dec 25, 2019, 10:06 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…

The app sounds like a dystopian nightmare, but this rebuttal is equally bad. Students are adults. If they don't want to show up, then they can not show up. If they can't muster the internal motivation to go to college and do the work, then that's on them.