261–270 of 293 posts
>The launch was so sudden that some students were alarmed to see an unknown man enter their classroom, stick a small device near their desks, and walk away. The student newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel, reported on “an individual” entering class to install a “tracking device” and filed for school records related to the SpotterEDU contract.
This can be undone.
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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 g…
How does one get the material without attending? Where I studied, the courses were not simply following the course text as the course. Perhaps at lower tier schools that’s all they do.
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As a human, not referring to a machine... when network delays made you late... how did you know when you submitted it that you got it done in time? ;-) Were network delays not something that needed to be factored in if you were submitting via network, much as postal delays might need to be considered when submitting via mail?
At the very least, the timestamp on the file (although, yes, timestamps can be spoofed, etc., etc.). In any case, I've always been pardoned when the "lateness" is three seconds' worth of processing. But if I were waiting on line at the deadline to hand in a physical assignment (the closest analogy I can make), I think that most reasonable profs would not take issue with me if I didn't happen to get to the end of that…
I wouldn't suggest a measure where a prof was relying on a huge digital clock. I was trying to address a context that wasn't machine driven as you were advocating. There are simpler realities. A prof who will accept submissions until they leave for the day. For remote education, the physical mail thing is very real (or at least it used to be).
If neither party is benefiting from machine precision, there's no reason for the onus to be on the professor or administrator to make allowances for that imprecision. It actually makes a lot of sense for that onus to be on the student.
> 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…
The proliferation of data platforms and fancy tools makes it easy to build dashboards, etc. One former colleague is doing a lot of research and statistics gathering by correlating use of campus swipe cards to grades and other academic warning signs. If they detect that you’re out late, using soda machines at 3am, bugging out for the weekend, etc they may trigger some of sort intervention.
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I disagree. I went to the University of Canterbury (the New Zealand one), the bar to entry was literally to pass your high school exams. We were treated like adults, and attendance was entirely optional for most lectures and tutorials. If you failed a paper because you didn't go to any lectures, that was your problem.
If you fail out, it's not just your problem though. It's also the taxpayers who paid for the school that the student wasted. That remains true whether that's a Scandinavian model of fully-paid schools, a US public university model of a partially taxpayer funded & partially student funded or even a private university if it ultimately results in a taxpayer funded loan forgiveness or other subsidy.
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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…
My university cs department (most of them, anyway) used a system I liked very much: - 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 compr…
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I had one professor in college who went hard in the other direction—she told the class "I don't care if you turn in assignments late", and gave no limit on how late you could be. As a student, it was, well, nice. It was true that it was a bit harder to be motivated to finish a paper right away, but it also made the process far less stressful. When I turned in papers I thought they were the best they could be. Of cour…
> I had one professor in college who went hard in the other direction—she told the class "I don't care if you turn in assignments late", and gave no limit on how late you could be. This doesn't work if your class builds on earlier material (most STEM classes). As the professor, I need some feedback as to how well the class understands what I just taught.
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I work in higher ed. I wouldn't say admin are douchebags, they are just under pressure and responding with a solution. For various reasons schools are under pressure to increase student success which is measured by retention, persistence, graduation rates among others. These systems help "teach to the test" if you will. They are pitched in slick presentations with complex statistics with dubious claims to non-technic…
In fairness though, thinking by enforcing attendance you improve outcomes is a misreading of the data. Sure, when students attend classes, they tend to do better... when the choice to attend is without consequences . Once you make it mandatory, there's a good chance it will cease to be an effective predictor of outcomes, and it may even negatively harm outcomes (classrooms behave differently when attendance is mandat…
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Lets not blame tech, the root cause is the administrators are douchebags. Tracking because they can is their fault. Adding control because they can is their fault. Not doing their testing of their unneeded system? Not being responsive at the tech support level? All their fault. They neither need nor deserve the excuses and allowing them that rhetorical shield has only harmful results.
>Lets not blame tech, the root cause is the administrators are douchebags. as if there aren't sales people in these tech companies pushing these kinds of products.