RFID Checks Student Attendance in Arizona

The student newspaper at UW-Madison is running a piece about the use of RFID to check lecture attendance at Northern Arizona University. One poster to an email discussion list suggested that getting around this system would be simple if "all one has to do is walk into a classroom with 10 RFID-enabled cards in their pocket." "The new system will use sensors to detect students' university identification cards when they enter classrooms, according to NAU spokesperson Tom Bauer. The data will be recorded and available for professors to examine. ... [The spokesman] added the sensors, paid for by federal stimulus money, initially would only be installed in large freshmen and sophomore classes with more than 50 students. NAU Student Body President Kathleen Templin said most students seem to be against the new system. She added students have started Facebook groups and petitions against the sensor system. ... One of the most popular Facebook groups ... has more than 1,400 members." What are the odds that the use of tracking RFID will expand over time on that campus?

Comments

Prove it does not work

[RichMan]

Wrap your card in tinfoil and keep it in your pocket and go to class.
Then ask to see the attendance record immediately after class, before leaving the class. Because you are worried about the attendance being correctly recorded.
You will not be on the list. Just pull out the card to prove it was on your person.

System proven to fail. Go on record as protesting the failure of the attendance system to accurately record your presence.

For bonus points:
Then have everyone bug the system every time after every class to confirm their attendance, so they don't get deducted by the system for not being present.

Re:Attendence in college?

[bcrowell]

>>If they're wrong, they'll be punished at exam time.

>Or, they turn around and blame the professor (and the school) for failing to teach them. And ask for their money back. If the school can demonstrate, that they have not attended the classes, they can defend themselves.

IAACCP (I am a community college professor), teaching physics. Parent is sort of on the right track, although wrong about the specifics.

Students at my school hate -- hate hate HATE!!! -- any course in which the grade in the course is based 100% on exams. Why do they hate it? Because it's unfair. Why is it unfair? Because their grades on exams are always unfair. Always. They deserved more partial credit. The exam problems weren't the same as the ones in the book. The exam had a problem on that one chapter that they didn't understand, and that wasn't fair, because they understood the other chapters. Also, the student's friend got a bad grade too, and that proves that the exam was unfair, because that shows that nobody could do it.

As a professor, I do not have the option of doing something that is perceived as unfair, even if the perception is totally based on self-delusion and wishful thinking. It's not, as the parent suggests, that the students will sue. It's simply that they will choose not to enroll in my classes. Then all my sections will get canceled. Yeah, I have tenure, but my life is going to get pretty miserable if every class I teach is canceled every single semester.

So what I have to do is cover my exams with a figleaf of other graded work. In my physics lecture/lab classes, 75% of their grade in lecture is based on exams. The other 25% doesn't really have any effect on their grades, but it's enough to convince them that their grade wasn't completely based on those horrible, unfair exams. I've always collected homework papers and written comments on them, but the psychological perception of fairness requires that these papers count for some tiny amount of credit (16% is what I'm doing these days). It's not satisfactory to the students just to get comments written on their paper so they have feedback; they feel that it must count for some pathetic number of points, or else the course is unfair. I've explored some of the other psychological parameters of what they perceive as fair. For example, I've tried (a) giving four equally weighted exams, and (b) giving two "practice" exams that didn't count much, plus a midterm and final that counted a lot. Option b was considered extremely unfair, so I had to switch back to a.

So I have absolutely no option but to have something like 25% of their grade be based on something other than exams. As long as I'm doing that, what the heck does it matter whether or not I take attendance? My school requires me to take attendance, and drop students who don't attend. I don't have a problem with that. I just use homework to determine attendance, and anyone who's not turning in homework (or other written work) gets dropped. If they do the homework but get their friend to drop it off for them, I don't have a problem with that.

What TFA seems to be describing is the kind of thing that happens in a particular sort of class at big state universities. This is the kind of class where there are 300, 400, or 500 students in a gigantic auditorium. State universities teach a bunch of their freshman classes this way because it saves them a ton of money. Students' perceptions of fairness and unfairness are determined by different criteria in this type of class. Everyone knows that lectures in this type of class are a complete waste of time. Everyone knows that this type of class represents an extremely poor quality of education. Given that the whole thing is a sham, it makes sense to do silly stuff like using RFID for attendance, because the whole thing is just a cynical exercise, so why not do the thing that minimizes costs? And students, of course, do not have the option of voting with their feet, because these 500-person classes exist by virtue of the fact that they're required courses, and freshmen have no other options.