St. Xaviers to put an end to proxy attendance for good

The tradition of giving a ‘proxy’ attendance for a friend may be as old as the attendance system itself. But now, colleges have taken it upon themselves to put an end to the practice.

Since attendance in typically compulsory in most city colleges, every year one comes across a few cases where students were barred from giving exams due to their poor attendance record.

With city colleges filled with hundreds of students per class, for most students, asking a ‘studious close friend’ to give proxy attendance seemed easier than actually attending the lecture. Oftentimes, those who still don’t manage to make the cut, come back to the college to complain about how their low attendance could be a result of a manual error.

But over the last few years, more and more city colleges are adopting technology to put an end to proxy attendance. Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Powai was amongst the first colleges to switch to a biometric attendance system where students’ attendance was recorded on the basis of their physical thumbprint.

Tata Institute of Special Sciences (TISS) is another college that has made the switch to smart cards for recording attendance.

Now one of city’s premier institutions, St. Xaviers, is also set to implement biometric scanners in all courses across their college. The college had ran a pilot with their first year economics class last year to test its feasibility. With the pilot run successful, the college is implementing the biometric attendance system for all it’s students from this June.

Although for the first year, the college will maintain both manual and biometric attendance to avoid any teething problems.