With every college insisting on students completing at least 80 per cent of classroom hours, youngsters are finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of their attendance record.
‘Bunk Monitor,’ an app developed by a team of students at Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M), and which will be made available to all scholars, promises to help them keep tabs on their attendance.
“While it is preferable to attend all lectures, sometimes, missing classes is unavoidable. An app that can tell students if it is alright to miss a class at a particular time will save them from future trouble,” said Awanish Raj, third-year electrical engineering student, who is part of the app developer team.
The app will have details of the timetable, including the electives, and students can enter information every day to indicate if they ‘bunked’ or ‘attended’ or if a class was cancelled.
At a time set by the user, the app will send daily notifications prompting the student to attend a class, indicate the attendance level, and also send warnings in case of borderline attendance.
“The idea was proposed by students of IIT-M as many of us feel the need for such an app,” said Awanish.
“Last year, I got a backlog because I was stuck at 84 per cent attendance. There were 30 others like me. Our calculation of class hours had gone wrong,” he said.
The app, developed for Android platforms, will be released in the coming weeks, said bio-technology student Junaid Babu, another member of the app team.
“Students often tend to miscalculate the number of classes needed for mandatory attendance. This app will relieve them of that worry,” said Awanish.
Students in other colleges, when asked about the utility of the app, said they are looking forward to it. Last year, as per records, 780 students of Anna University were not allowed to appear for exams because of shortage of attendance.
L. Arun Kumar, student of a private engineering college, said, “My college insists on 90 per cent attendance, though the university seeks just 75 per cent. Travelling 30 km to college, every day, is tiring, particularly, when there is a project to be submitted, which is when we bunk classes the most.”
There are also instances when students, despite attending classes, forget to sign the roll-call sheet that is circulated in the course of a lecture. “The app will remind us to do that, at the least,” said Arun Kumar.
