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

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#291

Post by seventhtiger » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 5:03 AM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #290

seventhtiger wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the adult argument has fell through. Now it's about being a customer. Service providers can fire customers. If you pay for membership of a club but never attend functions, the club will end your membership. If the service aims to provide a community or is invested in the success of its customers then it should fire customers who are not invested in their own success. Not to mention how many students are not custom…

The adult argument didn't fall through. If you pay a psychologist for an appointment and you don't show up the psychologist will happily arrange another appointment and gladly receive the money. You are comparing a job to university but they are not comparable in this way.

The adult argument has absolutely fallen through because adults' attendance is tracked in another situation. So it's not a matter of being adult. It's a matter of what the specific relationship is of the student to the university.

It's ironic you mention psychologists. Therapists, personal trainers, life coaches, and other 1-to-1 service providers are the most likely to fire a customer for not attending. I personally know someone whose vocal coach made an ultimatum about attendance and ended up firing the customer. This is all very much adult.

In the end it's the sad consumerization of higher education in America. The pricing makes students so bitter as to demand "better service" rather than "better education". A university is more like a job in most of the world.

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#292

Post by dragonwriter » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 5:23 AM UTC

seventhtiger wrote: post #224

yusyusyus wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workplace attendance tracking is certainly not universal. When I teach classes, if a student does not perform the requisite work to complete the course, I’ve no interest in their success. I am an instructor, not a motivator.

For the vast majority of jobs being absent a full work week without approval means you don't have a job the next week. Why does being an adult university student mean you can be absent for months and still succeed? It has nothing to do with adulthood. And why do we need instructors? Let's just give each student some textbooks and their exam schedule. If they can't succeed we're not interested in their success. The Da…

> For the vast majority of jobs being absent a full work week without approval means you don't have a job the next week.

College isn't a job for the student, it's a training and certification program that the student is paying for. The accreditation agencies that validate that the program is appropriate for the certifications being offered generally do not require attendance tracking, because regularity of attendance isn't what is being certified.

> Why does being an adult university student mean you can be absent for months and still succeed?

Attendance tracking in schools for children serves a number of purposes related to the fact that the students are children, including that students are not entrusted to review the syllabus and evaluate the level of engagement required for success on their own. Most students can't be absent for months and succeed, and if they try they will fail. Attendance tracking isn't needed for that if your assessment, grading, and academic standards are working properly (and attendance tracking doesn't fix the problem if they are not.)

> And why do we need instructors?

Because those are among the educational resources students are paying for (though there are universities where that is less the case than traditional universities, such as the competency-based WGU, which has won high praise from many corners.)

Re: Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines

#293

Post by mercer » Mon, Dec 30, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

ellius wrote: post #73

WalterBright wrote: post #43

> 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…

I attended a private high school that gave us a remarkable degree of freedom at a young age. We were allowed to drive off campus as upper classmen, choose a wide range of electives, and generally were treated as the near-adults we were. Recently I read that my high school is instituting a random drug testing policy. I wrote a letter (that I'm sure they promptly ignored) saying how the thing I most remember about my h…

I somehow managed to be person who least attended my last three years of high school. Which is pretty unusual for someone on the highest, 3rd-tier track which over here is what you need to do to attend college. For comparison, the 1st-tier is stereotyped as pot-smoking dropouts who can only go to vocation schools after finishing high school.

I didn't realize that my attendance was tracked, because there was a pretty laissez-faire attitude all-around. Most teachers liked me because when I did show up, I was actively present, and the only moment that might've caused me to suspect something was a conversation with a teacher who, in a very friendly way, told me he couldn't give me copies of the notes from the past year because my attendance had been abysmal.

Still, I didn't really think about any of this until the principal called me in and told me he should really expel me. And yet, he was sympathetic to my situation (severe anxiety) and let me off the hook because my grades were okay.

And so in the final months before college I stayed, made sure to attend classes, and finished with acceptable grades.

The very next year (in part perhaps because of me?) the school modernized their systems and I had to listen to the tales of woe from my younger siblings at the same school. None of them could get even close to my behavior because everything was tracked, quantified, part of the new computer system.

My sister got diagnosed with severe ADHD and one of my brothers went for the third-tier track even though he's just as smart as I am.

I'm convinced that the increased measurement and decreased freedom affected them negatively, and I find it very worrying that the siblings that went on to college seem to have similar issues (because, of course, at university I was one of the least-attending students who somehow still got along with the professors and had decent grades).

To be clear, I'm not excusing myself. In hindsight I wish had attended more and put in more effort and played the game better. I'm just saying that I at least had the freedom, in high school and university, to do things my own way and still do okay. this strikes me as very difficult for my younger siblings, because so much more is measured and quantified and required.