111–120 of 293 posts
Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics: First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional privat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It worked Of course, it works. And it would work even better if you permanently installed an anal probe in each student, plus a few electro-stimulators, and an automatic feeder.
That's a super uncharitable interpretation of the GP's argument. Privacy is a spectrum. By your "logic", should students' entire identities be concealed from education personnel? Of course not. That's just as ridiculous as what you proposed.
> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and e…
On the other hand, schools like the one I went to would have a horrible(r) matriculation rate if students were not forced to attend certain classes. It infuriurates me (and I think students who want to fail should be allowed to fail), but ultimately it's a product of the financial incentive structure; more graduates = more $$$.
And forcing attendance of some classes does indeed increase the likelihood of certain borderline students graduating, nobody can deny that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a super uncharitable interpretation of the GP's argument. Privacy is a spectrum. By your "logic", should students' entire identities be concealed from education personnel? Of course not. That's just as ridiculous as what you proposed.
On the contrary, it's a concise rejection of the worldview that privacy means privacy from others, not privacy from me, and that students are interchangeable units subject not to any consideration of ethics but only performance.
The poster seemed extremely cognizant of privacy concerns, and was defending a limited collection of specific data under very narrow circumstances for similarly delimited purposes. Put another way, saying "I think some specific data collection is ethical" is not the same as saying "all data collection I do is ethical, others may not be ethical".
They also seemed to implicitly reject the students-are-interchangeable idea: the whole point of gathering this data is to determine if students (as individuals, classes, or entire schools) are struggling or in need of help. That's the opposite of interchangeable; that's finding suffering outliers.
I'm harping on it 'cause I think I may be closer to your position on this issue than I am to the original poster's, but ... you're making extremist straw men, talking about feeding trays, and all but reciting the lyrics from the Pink Floyd song. I think that's making pro-privacy positions look bad.
EDIT also what about my first point: is any data collection on students ethical? Names? Addresses? Test results? Or should teachers only operate behind double-blind, voice-and-handwriting-obfuscated screens from their students? See? I can make straw men, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I've been an instructor for CS courses before so I know what you mean. I never made deadlines anything but absolutely final, which is appropriately not unlike a lot of other things in life --- from what I've heard from others, any leniency just tends to cause more whining. Someone who waits until the last second to do something is not going to do any better if given a tiny bit more time (nevermind the question of how…
- Due dates are hard (usually midnight)
- Everyone gets 3 "emergency tokens", which give you a 24 hour extension on the assignment, no questions asked. Max 2 per assignment.
- On occasion, you could get an extension without using a token by speaking to the professor in advance, if you had extenuating circumstances.
It was a good compromise between meaningful deadlines and humanity. One particular advantage is that, if you missed the midnight deadline, you knew you were using a town anyway, so there was no pressure to sacrifice sleep to get the assignment in "on time".
Most people I knew were happy with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It worked Of course, it works. And it would work even better if you permanently installed an anal probe in each student, plus a few electro-stimulators, and an automatic feeder.
That's a super uncharitable interpretation of the GP's argument. Privacy is a spectrum. By your "logic", should students' entire identities be concealed from education personnel? Of course not. That's just as ridiculous as what you proposed.
> logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance. The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn't want to attend, they didn't attend. I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and e…
This sort of thing doesn't work at schools that don't have such a high bar of entry. Caltech can afford to treat their students like adults, because they're picked from the cream of the crop. On the other hand, schools like the one I went to would have a horrible(r) matriculation rate if students were not forced to attend certain classes. It infuriurates me (and I think students who want to fail should be allowed to…
Speaking from the Devil's Advocate side, as I work in Higher Education analytics: First: this data is, by the vast majority of institutions, used very respectfully in terms of privacy rights and it is ABSOLUTELY never sold. Third part vendors that provide hosted systems are REQUIRED to affirm that they pass nothing on to any other party whatsoever. (I should note that this is the case in public and traditional privat…
What happens if they opt out?
And can they opt out of assessment by default, while still allowing data collection? That is, could the data be collected, but go into a secure archive, which only the student could access? So if the student isn't doing well, they could release selected data to advisers.