Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...
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Professor develops new app for GPS tracking student attendance
A Cal Poly San Luis Obispo professor requires his students to check in for class on a new app he developed, but he has faced concerns about privacy.
Students in his classes must use the app.
...note that this is the only way to show a record of attendance. Elsewhere...:
With this, my attendance is done, and now counts as 10% of their course grade.
Back to the article
“But I can’t convince them that I’m not going to do anything with the data I’m getting. It’s just the app, server and a database, but it is hard to convince people.”
But Bensky stressed he doesn’t store any information about where his or any other students are on campus. He said he would be fascinated to research where students are when they miss class, but said “it would be too creepy.”
“I don’t know that,” Bensky, referencing students’ locations. “It would be interesting to study, interesting to see where they are when they are absent, but no.”
An instructor must choose to clear the data after the class has ended. Bensky plays no role in that, he said.
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My school bought an off-the-shelf system that had each student buy a remote with buttons on it. Then during class, the professor would show a multiple choice question on screen and you'd connect your remote to some base station in the class and vote.
I guess this sort of stuff is only needed for freshman classes? By 3rd/4th year I don't think my teachers cared that much about whether or not you came to class, if you knew the material then you knew the material
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But Bensky stressed he doesn’t store any information about where his or any other students are on campus. He said he would be fascinated to research where students are when they miss class, but said “it would be too creepy.”
In this particular case, I guess it would be relatively simple to check if the app only calls the "get location" API when you press the button...
There's a dozen ways to track student attendance without needing a GPS tracker though. You could use an old fashioned "check in" system with fingerprints or cards. Or broadcast a signal from the phone and detect it from the class.
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@anonymous234 said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
But Bensky stressed he doesn’t store any information about where his or any other students are on campus. He said he would be fascinated to research where students are when they miss class, but said “it would be too creepy.”
In this particular case, I guess it would be relatively simple to check if the app only calls the "get location" API when you press the button...
iOS has a nice way of solving this particular problem: You can decide whether the app gets location data all the time or only if it is running visibly in the foreground (or don't share at all, of course).
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So what happens when a student doesn't have a smartphone? Or has an unsupported system?
And why is this guy advertising his app with a Google doc when the doc itself contains a link to the app's website? Why not just put the text there?
Is California even a real place or is it just an elaborate joke people run on the internet to see how far they can push the insanity before people start questioning things?
Edit: Also is tracking attendance even necessary in a university? I always thought students should be allowed to ignore lectures (just lectures, not practical exercises, lab lessons or whatever) as long as they can catch up and pass exams.
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@bb36e said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
By 3rd/4th year I don't think my teachers cared that much about whether or not you came to class, if you knew the material then you knew the material
This is how every college class I've had worked, except for the classes where the professors didn't care about anything involving the students.
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@blek said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
is tracking attendance even necessary in a university?
Technically no, but the students who are poor at attendance tend to be the students who have problems passing the exams. This applies particularly to tutorial sessions, as they're the time when a student can ask for help if they're having problems understanding something; lectures and lab sessions aren't as critical (and you can now use online resources to cover a lot of what they offer).
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@dkf Yeah, of course, but they're only hurting themselves
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@blek That's largely my attitude too, but there are pastoral reasons for tracking too. (Don't want students having undetected mental breakdowns. Suicides are bad for business, and can be embarrassing too.)
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@PJH He could have just used iClicker, it's what my college did to do the same thing.
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@dkf said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
@blek said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
is tracking attendance even necessary in a university?
Technically no, but the students who are poor at attendance tend to be the students who have problems passing the exams.
And instead of fixing that problem, you're gaming the metric, which will make the correlation disappear but the students will fail the exams just the same. And because you made the correlation disappear, it's even harder to predict who it'll be. Not that anyone's ever done anything useful with this information - but still.
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Yeah, if that were required for any of my classes I would have accepted the max grade of 90%. Fuck your tracking.
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I wonder what the school's bylaws say about accessibility of attendance checking. If what I heard about Californian universities is true, it should be entirely probably that pretending you don't know how/are unable to use the app could lead to the administration devising an assistance procedure that the teacher would have to follow that would be ten times more painful than regular attendance check with a list of names.
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@dkf said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
Don't want students having undetected mental breakdowns.
And yet they're building things like this Cry Closet that literally encourages mental breakdowns.
Stressed over final exams? This Utah university has a 'cry closet' for students
The 'cry closet' was created by a senior in the fine arts program at the University of Utah.
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In the Netherlands (in Europe really), tracking is illegal when you don't have a consent of the user who is being tracked. Some cities used wifi-tracking and got a (symbolic) fine because of it.
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@Flips said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
In the Netherlands (in Europe really), tracking is illegal when you don't have a consent of the user who is being tracked.
99.99% of students (at least in Poland) would give their college any consent they want no matter how ridiculous it was. Source: it actually happens all the time. At my university they've had a major fuckup with billing recently where they were very late with sending invoices for tuition for next semester, and finally sent them out on Friday afternoon right before the semester started, and made them due Sunday morning (even if someone would've managed to see it and react in time, in Poland, wire transfers don't work on weekends so they'd be late anyway). Even the bylaws say they cannot put due date on Sunday, and yet they did - and they've then imposed late payment fee on everyone in my year. To my knowledge, I was the only one who even tried to appeal (and I was dismissed the first three times, but was annoying enough that they cancelled the fee the fourth time around).
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@dkf said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
@blek said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
is tracking attendance even necessary in a university?
Technically no, but the students who are poor at attendance tend to be the students who have problems passing the exams.
So? Aren’t these adults we’re talking about?
As far as I remember, I only had a single lecture that tracked attendance, and that was a basic paper list. Even that was useless. Yes, we gamed it a few times, but it was a boring compulsory-optional so I slept through most of it, anyway.
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@blek said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
Is California even a real place or is it just an elaborate joke people run on the internet to see how far they can push the insanity before people start questioning things?
I thought that was the appeal of living here. Can't let the flat-earthers have all the fun.
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@dkf said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
but the students who are poor at attendance tend to be the students who have problems passing the exams. This applies particularly to tutorial sessions,
They're fucking adults.
Allow them to fail.
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@topspin said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
As far as I remember, I only had a single lecture that tracked attendance, and that was a basic paper list. Even that was useless. Yes, we gamed it a few times, but it was a boring compulsory-optional so I slept through most of it, anyway.
I've posted before about the one (only? I don't remember for sure any more — it's been a long time — but definitely the only one in which attendance was a big deal) class where attendance was taken by passing a paper around the room on which students were required to indicate their presence. (I don't remember how that was indicated, checking a box, writing your name, or a signature, so I'm not sure how easy it was to cheat.) I'm not even sure I'd call it gaming; they'd indicate their attendance, then blatantly stand up and walk out. And yes, it was boring, the most boring class I've ever taken. It was an introduction to Economics, not the most exciting material under the best of circumstances, but feeding the textbook into a text-to-speech device would have been more lively than the instructor; he'd have found a way to make human reproductive anatomy, with live demonstrations, boring.
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@Gąska said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
And yet they're building things like this Cry Closet that literally encourages mental breakdowns.
OK, we don't want (full) mental breakdowns. We want students to keep their shit together and graduate; the way student finances work, we really don't want them to take longer than they ought, and financial disputes are a good way for everyone (except lawyers) to lose a lot of money. It is our experience (according to many academics I've talked to over the years) that failure to attend tutorials is overwhelmingly correlated with failure to pass; there are many reasons that this can happen, especially with international students (family problems back home are actually the biggest single source of issues, and one for which we can make accommodation if we're told about it, but if we're not told we can't do anything at all).
(We also try to be selective and only admit people to the course who we believe can actually pass it. We're pretty choosy about this; I understand not all universities take the same approach, but the other top universities will be largely similar. Selective admission is a critical part of being top, and affects everything about teaching.)
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@xaade said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
They're fucking adults.
Allow them to fail.The ones who are bone-idle oxygen wasters? Yes. But we try to not let them get on the course in the first place. We want to monitor the other students, to spot the ones getting in trouble so that we can intervene and ensure that they complete the education that they've paid for.
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The 'cry closet' was created by a senior in the fine arts program
Yeah, definitely an official University endeavour and not some art installation by a student.
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The university acknowledged the closet's installation, which was approved by the school
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@HardwareGeek said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
he'd have found a way to make human reproductive anatomy, with live demonstrations, boring.
Consider him double-dared.
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@levicki said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
What is stopping students from just sniffing the app exchange with the server and making their own app for check-in which will always respond with a classroom location (+/- smal rand() value on each axis) even if they are not actually there?
Or, even easier, installing this (or something like it):
Fake GPS location - Apps on Google Play
Teleport your phone to any place in the world with one click!
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@blek said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
Is California even a real place or is it just an elaborate joke people run on the internet to see how far they can push the insanity before people start questioning things?
The late Mrs Cynic lived there for a number of years, including the very end of the calendrical Sixties at Berkeley (the town), and a couple of years as an airman at the now-defunct George AFB near Victorville. I've been in different parts of California myself on a few occasions. (I gotta say that Fresno lives down to its reputation as a dull place.) So, from a geographical point of view, yes, it exists. (Mrs Cynic was, however, prone to asserting that Oklahoma was not a real place.)
The most important thing to remember about California (the people-part) is that despite its reputation as being as full of flakes and nuts as a bowl of muesli, it has historically been politically conservative - they elected Ronald Reagan as governor, ffs.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
The most important thing to remember about California (the people-part) is that despite its reputation as being as full of flakes and nuts as a bowl of muesli, it has historically been politically conservative - they elected Ronald Reagan as governor, ffs.
Yes, the Southern parts were heavily military / aerospace. The central valley was (still is) farmers. Both had a lot of conservatives, and still do. Just not as many as compared to non-conservatives who have increased in numbers. There is still some aerospace / defense in Southern California, but the end of the Cold War and Boeing's acquisition of McDonnell Douglas really put some big dents in those industries.
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@dkf said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
to spot the ones getting in trouble so that we can intervene and ensure that they complete the education that they've paid for.
I can understand the school wanting to protect its reputation by having kids pass. Just understand it comes at the cost of your reputation once workplaces hire your graduates.
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@boomzilla said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
Just not as many as compared to non-conservatives who have increased in numbers.
Liberals tend to migrate to places that they destroy economically, then need to migrate to the next place.
It was California, now it's becoming Texas.
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@xaade I'm just going to leave this here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_capita
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@dfdub said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
@xaade I'm just going to leave this here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP_per_capita
That's not how you measure the reasons for economic migration.
Why GDP fails as a measure of well-being
The current yardstick misses the mark several ways, especially by not capturing benefits gained from technology
GDP doesn't capture the disparity between income and cost of living.
I don't care if you have 10 million dollars, if a house half the size of mine costs 200 million.
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@xaade said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
GDP doesn't capture the disparity between income and cost of living.
But it measures the economy and your claim was that those states were being ruined economically. That's simply false.
Now you suddenly talk about the housing market, that's
.
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@dfdub said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
@xaade said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
GDP doesn't capture the disparity between income and cost of living.
But it measures the economy and your claim was that those states were being ruined economically. That's simply false.
Now you suddenly talk about the housing market, that's
.I can see how you see the moving goalpost, but it's not really one.
The point I'm making is that liberals migrate to a state, make it hard for themselves, then migrate to another successful state and make it hard for themselves, and continue to do so.
The fact that they leave behind wealthy companies and wealthy rich people doesn't change the migration, and only serves to undermine their mantra of caring about the poor.
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@xaade I think I understand what you're trying to say now, but putting the blame on a political side is still ridiculous. There is a general problem with people moving away from the country and further overcrowding already overcrowded metropolitan areas with attractive job opportunities. This has absolutely nothing to do with the political affiliation of the internal migrants - any correlation is purely coincidental.
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@dfdub said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
any correlation is purely coincidental.
No it's not.
I can make an argument for investigation by a correlation between economic migrants and voter registration.
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@xaade Then please explain the causal relationship between political affiliation and internal migration.
Right now, it just sounds like the typical US us-vs.-them mentality created by the two-party system. You're ridiculously divided and instead of thinking about how to fix that, you're pouring more oil on the fire and arguing about who's responsible.
Edit: BTW, "argument for investigation" is an interesting way of spelling "completely unfounded claim".
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@xaade said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
The point I'm making is that liberals migrate to a state, make it hard for themselves, then migrate to another successful state and make it hard for themselves, and continue to do so.
Yeah, I don't think the data supports that.
I'll agree that NIMBYism is a selfish plague that ruins cities though.
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@dfdub said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
You're ridiculously divided and instead of thinking about how to fix that, you're pouring more oil on the fire and arguing about who's responsible.
I'm far from divided. There are plenty of things I disagree with conservatives about. However, economic policy is not always one of them.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
- they elected Ronald Reagan as governor, ffs.
And Schwarzenegger.
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@pie_flavor I’m probably
’ing, but isn’t he quite a liberalgreen Conservative?
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@topspin idk, but he's also Schwarzenegger.
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@levicki said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
He is a RINO, he holds quite a few liberal views (environmentalism, gun control, pro-abortion, assisted suicide, etc).
Well, seems you have quite a number of RINOs. In fact, the whole party seems to consist of them!
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@levicki I only wikipedia’d his views, since I remembered him being outspoken about saving the environment but not having much of a clue about his politics otherwise. The site said he was quite a hardliner on some other conservative issues like the death penalty, so it’s not purely that. Not that I care, I was just curious.
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@Rhywden The definition of "RINO" is now "whoever disagrees with the latest GOP president". I mean, McCain was called a RINO by Trump loyalists (and probably still is). I'm also pretty sure Reagan would be described as one these days.
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@dfdub said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
McCain was called a RINO
Was always a RINO.
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@xaade said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
@dfdub said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
McCain was called a RINO
Was always a RINO.
So a former presidential candidate for the party is not a proper representative of the party? You just proved my point.
The term is completely arbitrary and is only used as a means to deligitimize a political opponent's arguments. People who use that term also often act like disagreements and discussions inside a democratic political party are somehow heresy.
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@dfdub Indeed. We could do with more people who don't march in lockstep with the party leaders and don't always solely regard their re-electability as the sole metric upon which to act.
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@dfdub said in Students must install this GPS app to get 10% of their grade. Not creepy at all...:
So a former presidential candidate for the party is not a proper representative of the party? You just proved my point.
Isn't the current president a RINO?
