Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines
&gt; logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade.<p>Fortunately, I attended a college (Caltech) that as institute policy did not take attendance and no part of the grade was based on attendance.<p>The result was nobody was disruptive in class, because if students didn&#x27;t want to attend, they didn&#x27;t attend.<p>I remember sitting in class as a freshman thinking about this and enjoying being treated as an adult for the first time in my life. Nobody was telling me to go to class, admonishing me for not going, giving me credit for attendance or docking me for not.<p>The freshman EE class professor was famous (infamous?) for scheduling his lectures at 8AM, because he only wanted the interested students showing up at them.