Tokyo university gives away iPhones to nab truants via GPS

Friday 29th May, 04:02 PM JST

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Bento at 09:41 PM JST - 29th May

Perhaps you wrote them in a language nobody could follow.How is your iphone?
smithinjapan at 09:44 PM JST - 29th May

I'd take the free iPhone, then I'd bloody well tell them to bug$$r off if they thought they could screw me out of a diploma for missing class. You PAY for school in university, it's not the mandatory requirement that education is up to 16. If you don't feel like going, you don't go. If you didn't go the whole year but still fill and do well on any reports, pass exams/tests, and completely any tutorials/labs, then what's the problem?

It must be as one poster stated above, if they need to take attendance and make it mandatory, the classes must utterly suck. But knowing Japanese universities, and I've been to classes in some, that's not a massive surprise.
Ah_so at 09:50 PM JST - 29th May

You have to turn up to class in Japan? Poor things. At university I only had 2 or 3 compulsory hours a week, the lectures were optional.

After all, as long as I handed in essays on time and passed my exams, whose business is it whether I turn up or not.
jacqueshellacque at 09:57 PM JST - 29th May

[i]"attendance is a key requirement for graduation here"[/i]

Isn't it the only requirement?
memyselfI at 10:01 PM JST - 29th May

Wow !!!! The only requirement is to attend class and you can graduate

That goes for JHS and basically every school in Japan.

Wow !!!! That's great !!!
jeancolmar at 10:13 PM JST - 29th May

Japanese universities are basically b.s. but I do not think that all you have to do is attend class. You have to take a test or write a paper, I understand. Anyway, attendance often means sleeping through your lessons. Besides i-phone they could use alarm clocks.
gogogo at 10:51 PM JST - 29th May
Students are smarter than this...
- Left my phone at home today sorry
- I lost my phone
- Lent my phone to my friend
- Dropped it in the toilet
- I didn't have it turned on
- Ran out of batteries
- The software said error
- I was in an area of no signal
aedfed at 10:52 PM JST - 29th May

At the universities I taught at in Japan, the only way you could fail a student with no questions asked was to demonstrate that they hadn't attended class. One of the ironies is that the more "prestigious" universities in the cities had bigger attendance problems because the students are living on their own. At smaller regional universities, students are more likely to live at home and their moms make sure they get up and at least head towards university.

With an iPhone, even if the lecture's a bust, at least you can surf the Web and entertain yourself that way.

Given that they're in the school of informatics, maybe the whole point is to see whether they students can develop ways of spoofing the GPS system so it shows they're in class regardless of where they are. That would be worthy of an A.
noborito at 10:55 PM JST - 29th May

how will the 3rd party software work on the iphone without going through an extensive review by iTunes. I guess Jailbreak is on it's way to Japan too.
flammenwerfer at 11:37 PM JST - 29th May

this was news last week, things a little slow on JT?

this system in kind of scary, reminds of '1984'. Big brother is watching
30061015 at 12:26 AM JST - 30th May

Hey, teacher! Leave them kids alone!
ca1ic0cat at 03:17 AM JST - 30th May

Just attending class is part of the grade? I know you have to attend to pass the course but if the material is so weak that you can pass by cutting class I'd raise the teaching standards first.
Scrote at 11:21 AM JST - 30th May

I don't take attendance for my classes, but I find that the students you rarely see and those who only show up for exams tend to get very low scores and fail. The good students show up for all the classes, even if they are already familiar with the subject.
NuckinFutz at 09:05 PM JST - 3rd June

I guess they didn't read the iPhone manaual that explains how to easily TURN OFF the location services to prevent GPS tracking!
suityousir at 09:27 AM JST - 5th June

I must be one of those solitary ignoramuses who does not know that:

We all know that after entrance into any Japan university, you are virtually guaranteed to graduate, as long as you pay your tuition...

Luckily for me, my students are generally bright and have to work pretty hard to graduate.

Why don't they just save everyone the hassle and mail the diploma's along with their acceptance letter... Don't these teacher's take attendance...? What a joke...

Furthermore, they know when an apostrophe should be used to distinguish between the possessive and the plural.