To: CCNY Chief Financial Officer Felix Lam

From: Xavier Salomon (CCNY Freshman)

Subject: Attendance Recorder

Date: March 12, 2020

New Attendance System

Who am I?   

    My name is Xavier Salomon. I am attending City College of New York as a freshman and currently trying to enter the Grove School of Engineering. I intend on seeking a bachelor’s degree which means I will be in school for at least 4 years. Since this is my first year in college I’m taking in everything I see and hear to try and grasp any knowledge I can about college life. 

 

Introducing the Problem

    I have picked up on many things in my first year of college but nothing stood out to me like attendance did. When doing research and hearing about college life I never had the thought of “how is attendance taken?”. Now that I am in college I’m starting to see that college isn’t all that advanced. In middle school and in high school there were easy ways of taking attendance however in college the system is unreliable. We have a sheet of paper being handed around and asked to sign it which is a nuisance because it goes too much into class time and you have to look out for the paper because if you don’t sign it you will be marked absent. This is why we should develop a new way to to take attendance. Lucky for us I have found a reliable system that could work smoothly if executed correctly.

 

The Solution

An alternative system I have discovered is using our ID’s with a scanner. All we use our ID’s for is to enter buildings and sometimes the security doesn’t even look at it. My idea is that we can start putting a chip or a barcode on our ID’s. This would allow the ID to be eligible for scanning. The next part of this idea is a program to scan the ID to apply it to an attendance. This program would take the time you signed in so it knows if you were late or if you were on time and the professor would not have to worry about that. The student also wouldn’t have to disrupt the class looking for the attendance sheet. The ID scanner should be small and efficient for every professor to keep in their possession so it would be easy to carry around. I was also thinking we can even put it in the school entrance in order to get in but then I came to a realization that there are too many students for that. This would clog the entrances and make some people late for class. That’s why it should be only in the classrooms because there would be plenty of time to sign in. I’ve been in a huge class before with over 100 students in it so I know one scanner isn’t enough and will cause issues. Therefore in those types of classes there should be at least 2-3 scanners in those kinds of rooms. The scanners should be in front of the room where the professor can keep an eye on it because let’s be honest some of these students aren’t reliable. The ID should be renewed every semester as usual. There could be new sets of ID that was created for that semester or a program could be created to renew the ID digitally. This system would make attendance a breeze and easy like breathing.

 

Conclusions 

    Overall I feel like this new system will please both teachers and students because both parties complain about this. I’ve seen this system in action and it is very smooth and reliable. Also students can’t sign in their friends name or anything like that because now they would need their ID for that which would be a huge set back for them.