Harvard University has revealed that it secretly photographed some 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring as part of a study of classroom attendance, reports the Boston Globe.
The clandestine experiment, disclosed publicly for the first time at a faculty meeting Tuesday night, came to light about a year-and-a-half after revelations that administrators had secretly searched thousands of Harvard e-mail accounts.
Peter K. Bol, Harvard’s vice provost for advances in learning, said at the faculty meeting that researchers at the college’s Initiative for Learning and Teaching, which Bol oversees, installed cameras last spring to measure student attendance, according to a copy of his remarks provided by the university, according to BG.
The cameras snapped an image every minute, and a computer program scanned the images to count how many seats were empty and how many were filled during lectures.
Harvard did not disclose the names of the classes that were monitored, and the students whose images were captured had not yet been notified as of Wednesday afternoon.
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