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University Gives Away iPhones To Curb Truancy
Norsefire writes "A Japanese University is giving away iPhones to its students to use the phones' GPS functionality to catch students who skip classes. The University claims students currently fake attendance by having other students answer for them during rollcall, they also said that while this can be abused by giving other students the phone, they are much less likely to do this due to the personal information, such as email, a phone generally contains."
The article states that attendance at this university is a necessary requirement to graduate:
Truants in Japan often fake attendance by getting friends to answer roll-call or hand in signed attendance cards. That's verging on cheating since attendance is a key requirement for graduation.
Having said that, smart students would probably be able to figure out a way of disabling this 'feature' or spoofing it to show them as being in a different location pretty quickly. Also GPS often fails to get a usable signal in some buildings.
I think that attendance is often mandatory (certainly in tertiary studies that I've done in Australia it has been)
I went to university in Melbourne, and attendance was only mandatory for the practical/lab component of each course; lectures and tutorials were optional (but obviously recommended).