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."

Comments

There is always an easier solution...

[Goalie_Ca]

Okay. Umm.. Who the fuck cares if students show up to class or not. At university we are old enough to decide if class is a waste of time or not. I skipped tons of classes during my undergrad degree and this enabled me to actually assignments that I wouldn't have otherwise had time for.

Re:There is always an easier solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

So what?

They just give the phone to whoever is going to be signing in for them.

If they want to stop truancy, just give a quiz at the beginning of every class.

Of course if what they're interested in is giving the students an education, stop taking roll and just crack down on academics.

Re:There is always an easier solution...

[dov_0]

I think that attendance is often mandatory (certainly in tertiary studies that I've done in Australia it has been) because soaking in the subject during lecture, hearing questions answered and participating in group discussions are actually part of the educational process. It's not just about the essays or exams.

Re:There is always an easier solution...

[TheRaven64]

Last time I looked at the statistics from my university, there was a correlation between attendance and mediocre results. The worst students didn't turn up all the time, and failed because they didn't know the material. The good students didn't turn up all the time, and did well because they learned enough in the lectures they did attend to learn the rest on their own time.

The purpose of a university is not to teach, it's to provide an environment where a student can learn, and to let them know what they should learn to be considered an expert in a particular field. There is a reason we don't call lecturers and professors teachers; the teacher in a university should always be the student. The lecturer is a guide on the path to education, not a leader.

You don't need to go to lectures to be surrounded by people interested in the subject. When I was a student, I spent a couple of hours each day in a coffee shop on campus, and spent a lot of this time discussing various aspects of the subject with my peers. Part of university is learning to build your own structure, not requiring it to be rigidly enforced externally.