Mobile Phones Used For The Most Complex Roll Call Ever

from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept

There have been all these stories recently about how kids were using mobile phones to cheat in schools and how schools want to ban them. Of course, what people should be doing is looking for ways to use the phones to combat the cheating, or to be useful in other ways. Unfortunately, though, it's not entirely clear that this method, created by a lecturer at Aomori University in China Japan really does the trick. As pointed out by textually.org, someone has created one of the more complex attendance taking systems around. The professor gives out a number at the beginning of class. All students are then expected to text that number to an administrative account. Of course, that alone is easy to get around -- so the system then randomly selects five to ten students to send a message back to, and those students have to stand up in class and state their name. This, obviously, gets around the loophole where a student just tells a friend who's skipping what the daily number is. Of course, this seems like a pretty complex system for what we used to call roll call. Also, since when did college professors really care about whether or not their students actually made it to class?
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  1. identicon
    Pernille Rudlin, 13 Apr 2005 @ 2:44pm

    Japanese university mobile roll call

    It does sound a bit crazy from a European or American point of view but when you consider that Japanese university classes can be huge, a verbal roll call can take a long time. Also attendance at a class in a Japanese university is often enough to make sure you get a credit, no matter how poor the quality of your work is.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Sherrod Segraves, 14 Apr 2005 @ 6:37am

    Japan is not China

    Aomori University is in Japan, not China.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    Mike (profile), 14 Apr 2005 @ 9:20am

    Re: Japan is not China

    Ooops. Thanks for pointing that out.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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