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University of Arizona Tracks Student ID Card Swipes To Detect Who Might Drop Out (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The University of Arizona is tracking freshman students' ID card swipes to anticipate which students are more likely to drop out. University researchers hope to use the data to lower dropout rates. (Dropping out refers to those who have left higher-education entirely and those who transfer to other colleges.) The card data tells researchers how frequently a student has entered a residence hall, library, and the student recreation center, which includes a salon, convenience store, mail room, and movie theater. The cards are also used for buying vending machine snacks and more, putting the total number of locations near 700. There's a sensor embedded in the CatCard student IDs, which are given to every student attending the university. Researchers have gathered freshman data over a three-year time frame so far, and they found that their predictions for who is more likely to drop out are 73 percent accurate. They also have plans to give academic advisers an online dashboard to look at student data in real time. "By getting their digital traces, you can explore their patterns of movement, behavior and interactions, and that tells you a great deal about them," Sudha Ram, a professor of management information systems who directs the initiative, said in a press release.
The article is void on information on what specific statistics indicate a student is more likely to drop out. Are students who use their ID card to go to the rec center more likely to drop out over students who us it to enter the library? The article doesn't say.
I'd drop out of any school that followed me around like this. And once upon a time I was in grad school at UA.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
After all, dropouts are no longer paying students.
you know, Eastasia.
Society is becoming extremely rigid with these tight controls on everything. Rigid things tend to break catastrophically when stressed. Just saying.
But that isn't "big data analytic" enough.
Okay, I was going to dump on this, because the TheVerge article sucks. The press release, however, actually does a good job discussing some of the signals they track and how this ties into them. They even have a nice visualization of student traffic which hints at some ways that they might be able to infer stuff from all of it.
As an aside, the article contains this horrible quote (I really hope there's some missing context):
We think ...[we're] sort of doing what Amazon does — delivering items you didn't order but will be ordering in the future
I'm sorry, but I do not recall Amazon ever doing that. Quite frankly, I'd consider it really awkward to receive things in the mail based on what they thought I might need.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
why do I have to go an big lecture class even more so for the filler ones or ones where you just need cram for the test. I want to take classes I want to learn and not stuff I will never use.
Bayesian solutions should be capable of >80%.
The alledged wisdom of the crowds should get close to Bayes.
73% is a miss. They should take a class.
student athletes miss a lot of it. Hell if they make to the final 4 then that a lot + time missed to get it.
Oh, great! That's like in China! Next: predictive crime.
Ok, to be honest, I knew I hated school already. I should have dropped out of high school, middle school, or even kindergarten.
Still despise it. Viciously.
If I was on this campus and found out they were tracking me, I would swipe the hell out of my card in all sorts of places just to do it. Walk by the library, swipe the badge. Go by a common area, swipe again. Get a group together and have a session. Run a contest to see how many swipes you can get!
Student have time on their hands and they can get some interesting ideas on how to have fun and screw with people.
They also generate millions of dollars in revenue for the school...
Let's change some of the words:
Visa is tracking adults' credit card swipes to anticipate which adults are more likely to miss payments. Visa researchers hope to use the data to lower missed payment rates. (Missing payments refers to those who have stopped paying their balances entirely and those who transfer balances to other institutions.) The card data tells researchers how frequently an adult has entered a hotel, bookstore, and shopping malls, which include salons, convenience stores, and movie theaters. The cards are also used for buying vending machine snacks and more, putting the total number of locations over 9000. There's a chip embedded in the Visa card, which are acquired by almost every adult. Researchers have gathered new card owner data over a three-year time frame so far, and they found that their predictions for who is more likely to miss payments are 73 percent accurate. They also have plans to give financial advisors an online dashboard to look at data in real time.
Did your reaction change? Why or why not?
(-1, Truth)
Because it's a university. If you just want to learn what you want to learn, take a trade school.
University students are expected to take courses (ok, forced) in non-subject areas, usually called "complimentary studies" or other terminology. This helps produce more well-rounded students who have a breadth of knowledge rather than a rather narrow specialized field. This knowledge is designed to help one see their place in the world, or at the very least, ensure one mingles around with different sets of students. It's why the engineering classes always require classes from the fine/liberal arts and business classes, and which the reverse is true too.
At the very least, take business classes if you can. Economics and introductory management classes are very useful if one gets in the position of having minions.
Most universities have athletics departments that make sure their students are going to class and doing their work because they have academic eligibility requirements. Sure, if you're a school that's in the top ten it wouldn't surprise me if that gets bent a bit or that the university has shuffled those athletes into underwater basket weaving degrees that aren't particularly rigorous, but it isn't happening for the vast majority of athletes at the majority of institutions.
The only programs generating millions of dollars are football, hockey (for the limited number of schools that have teams), mens basketball, and perhaps women's basketball for a small number of schools. The rest are money pits and no one is going to run the risk of cooking the books for someone on the women's rugby team or men's cross country team.
We do the same. Swipes, library use, VLE use, network logins, attendance etc.
Throw it all into dashboard so students can see their engagement compared to their peers.
Bit of gamification which seems to work and pretty stats for management and most seem happy.
Helps some students who might otherwise drop through cracks.
We're trying to analyze data so we can figure out how to make more money.
Forget dropping out, give me access to the swipes at the soda vending machine and I'll tell you who is more likely to drop dead.
I'm surprised that the researchers didn't start to run into university politics before they published their result -- namely, that the University is using data to segregate students and preferentially help some students and not others.
Many a data science / predictive algorithm study has been sunk because university administrators think it singles out people, even if it is to help them.
"Considering what colleges charges for an education"
You should ask for your money back, you big dummy. Or maybe enroll into Evergreen College and dance your way to an engineering degree or whatever the hell they do in that lunatic asylum.
This helps produce more well-rounded students who have a breadth of knowledge rather than a rather narrow specialized field.
That's certainly the concept, but AIUI European universities don't do anything like this, and their graduates don't seem to have a worse general fund of knowledge than equally-educated Americans. I sure as hell didn't get all that much out of my "distributional" requirements. The really interesting stuff that was outside my major didn't count toward them - I think I was one class away from a minor in classics when I graduated.
It's funny because you could just as easily fake all the views, clicks, and subscriptions you're depending on slashdot for. It's such a small small number that youtube wouldn't ever notice. Besides your "subscriber link" trick is already dishonest enough to get you a strike if some minimum wage tubemonkey decides they need to pad their weekly numbers, people routinely get random strikes for insanely minuscule transgressions.
Like why don't you just get all the passwords for your google sockpuppet accounts and game your numbers over a proxy? Or ask your friends to give you that initial bump?
I get what you're doing, a small number of clicks and shit will ensure you're near the top of the list if you generate content on topics that aren't on the social radar yet.... but what you're doing here is building a huge embarrassing internet footprint. If you ever get any sort of popularity the trolls will come. Find what you've done here, and blog about your every tiny mistake. It'll be funny because you'll get eaten alive by other assholes trying to grift for their own clickbait pennies with articles about your child bride fixations and creepy female impersonations.
This! exactly This! One thousand times!
I am an on-line marketer myself and creimer has been burnt for a long time because of what I emphasized in your text above. The fucker is just too stupid to realize it.
You would put the fucker in an extra large boiling tank with warm water and turn on the heat and the fucker would be too dumb to get out if he could when it gets too hot.
creimer already pissed off many of us by bringing attention to friendly advertising plugs on Slashdot, especially when posted as AC and the Slashdot moderators have become intolerant to posts containing friendly links, thus hurting us all. AC posts on Slashdot used to generate more clicks before creimer decided to go crazy.
Everybody hates creimer, especially other online marketers and although I would never do anything illegal, I hear other marketers might when it comes to creimer.
Good luck dumb ass!
You should probably look at how often the NCAA investigations turn up something irregular then.
That isn't even counting the extremely offensive, if non-academic, failings at a certain school in the Keystone State.
I wonder how the "sensor" in the ID card responds to a hammer....
Millions of tax free dollars but wait, exactly why the fuck are they tax free dollars if the jock strap douche baggery has nothing what so ever to do with education.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So a boss and company, gov, mil knows a person wanting a job later can study and showed they can be punctual and can manage time.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
... tells you a great deal about them.
who would have thought???
Also, these young people are so easy game that next up we'll attach a body cam and an electro shock device so we can steer their behavior in real time.
Systems like this are everywhere now.
For example, here in the Netherlands a similar system is used in Dordrecht. It's extremely untransparant, where the makers say they want to avoid the hassle of a public debate..
Source: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/...
China is another obvious example. They use data to pinpoint students with potential psychological issues.
Source: https://www.volkskrant.nl/buit...
Big data is feeding our impulse to be risk averse. The question is what this does to students in the long run. See also:
https://www.socialcooling.com
How, by having my card at certain places at certain times? If anything, it proves that I can get people to do stuff for me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Everyone HAS to take user data authorized or not. The 2010s will be known not only for user privacy going away but for companies user-hostile behaviour.
They also generate millions of dollars in revenue for the school...
If the sport is football and the school is doing average to good, then the school would be profiting. Basketball? Your school needs to do well or no profit. Baseball? Not so much. Though, not every school has a football team. Besides, not every school has a good sport team. As a result, not many schools are actually making money if you are talking about number of schools in the US.
I work at a National Lab with hundreds of PhD holders from dozens, if not hundreds of different universities. In any non work related conversation I can easily tell the ones who went to the heavy hitter Ivy League universities like Harvard or Yale and those who went to places like Cal Tech or Texas A&M.
The graduates of the old liberal arts colleges have a deep, well rounded education. They understand history, literature and other non-technical subjects. The others typically filled out their non major courses with things like Film Appreciation, business classes or woman's studies, i.e. typically the classes that require the least reading, least thinking and least homework.
Maybe you aren't a very good programmer?
Can't have anyone leaving the Borg collective.
Would be reason enough for me to 'drop out' of that University.
And you won't attract the worm.
Are they going to implement a program that will try to give students an incentive to follow the non-dropout pattern?
I can see this going wrong in a couple of ways.
First, if they make the correlation/causation mistake, they may end up increasing the dropout rate by trying to force square pegs through round holes. Imagine if such a study was done on the study habits of the top 10% of highschoolers. You may find that they hardly study and never go to the library. If you were to force the bottom 10% to follow this pattern, they would surely fail.
Second, such an implementation would undermine the free choice of the consumer. If a student decides that school maybe isn't their thing or decides that another school would be more to their liking, why get in the way of that choice?
They could just do exit surveys and ask the dropouts why they are dropping out (it might be for financial reasons).
They also generate social unrest and crime for the area where the school is...but that is OK as long as they "make" money for the school
I get that students are responsible adults but when they are paying tens of thousands for their education, surely their tutors should be the ones noticing this, not a data mining operation?
That has more to do with the kind of people who get into Harvard or Yale than the kind of education that goes on there.