[jahmed]

I work in higher ed. I wouldn't say admin are douchebags, they are just under pressure and responding with a solution. For various reasons schools are under pressure to increase student success which is measured by retention, persistence, graduation rates among others. These systems help "teach to the test" if you will. They are pitched in slick presentations with complex statistics with dubious claims to non-technical staff who are poorly versed but like many high-level managers, smarter than their own good.

These systems are often pitched as turnkey solutions with very little input from the people on the ground who are expected to support and triage incidents in a system where training is thin if it even exists.

If, before you send your kids off to college, you look at college rankings then you're just as culpable in the use of these metric boosting systems.

[cbsmith]

In fairness though, thinking by enforcing attendance you improve outcomes is a misreading of the data. Sure, when students attend classes, they tend to do better... when the choice to attend is without consequences. Once you make it mandatory, there's a good chance it will cease to be an effective predictor of outcomes, and it may even negatively harm outcomes (classrooms behave differently when attendance is mandated).

[asdff]

I think this is something that is understood by a lot of people at universities, but the overlap between these people and the people writing checks is slim.