Why are students faking attendance? They feel cheated by the system
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Loading... - Graham Davies
- 13 Apr 2021
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My university has introduced a new method of monitoring student progress, a digital apparatus for tracking class attendance. Instead of students putting their initials on a register, they tap their ID cards on a card reader. The lecturer then navigates the university website to retrieve the tally – which is far more cumbersome than glancing at a sheet of paper. But that’s not the worst problem with the new system.
The digital attendance system is an educational software product, given a ridiculous tech startup-inspired name. It’s been bought in at considerable cost to the university to cover things like the installation of card readers in teaching rooms across the campus.
Despite its high price, it has glaring flaws. It doesn’t seem to communicate with other software, like Moodle, the open-source learning platform that provides students with resources for their modules. There are disparities between the number of students registered on each module and the number this system says attend classes. This disempowers lecturers from properly monitoring attendance – especially that of the more elusive students.
To make things worse, the system sometimes lists students as attending when they’re not. A technical glitch? Not this time. It turns out the system is open to abuse – by students. One colleague raised the issue in an email to members of the department, reporting that he arrived to start a class to discover a student tapping in and then leaving.
Another responded: “This is definitely a thing. In fact, I’m fairly certain I’ve spotted individuals carrying a stack of other students’ IDs walking from class to class around the turn of the hour, tapping in for them.” Yet another colleague said he’d seen it happening in other departments.
The system is also enabling universities to pull together a troubling amount of data on students, building a picture of their performance as individuals, and benchmarking it against peers with similar profiles. I don’t imagine students give much thought to the way this is used, any more than people who use Facebook do – though we may be witnessing that tide turning.
Lecturers are concerned by the new system too. Colleagues are wondering what happens if class attendance drops off. Someone in the upper echelons of university management might argue that their teaching isn’t good enough to keep students’ attention, though these metrics are a weak proxy for student engagement.
I’m talking about a minority of students abusing the system, but I still ask myself: what makes them behave that way? The trouble is, the student isn’t a customer, what they’re paying for is not a commodity and, in my view, that they’re having to pay for it is a con trick, a way of sucking private debt into the system to replace public funding. But if this is how the system treats them, this is what we’re going to get.
When we discussed these issues at a departmental meeting, another colleague reported a conversation she’d had with a group of students hanging around outside in the cold who admitted they were skipping class. When she pointed out they were wasting the money they were borrowing to be there, they said they didn’t care because they were sure they were never going to pay it back.
