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News & Notes: Harvard secretly photographed students in lecture halls last spring

A study conducted by Harvard on classroom attendance last spring by secretly photographing 2,000 students in 10 lecture halls last spring came to light Tuesday night at a faculty meeting.

During the meeting, Harvard’s Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Peter Bol remarked that the Initiative for Learning and Teaching installed cameras to record attendance, and pictures were scanned by a computer program to count the number of empty and occupied seats.

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Bol said the study was not meant to identify any individual, and the lack of prior notification was intended to avoid bias, according to The Boston Globe.

Bol said that the study went through the university’s review board beforehand.

The students whose images were captured were not notified until this Wednesday afternoon, and some students and faculty said the research was an invasion of privacy.

“You should do studies only with the consent of the people being studied,”Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis saidin an interview with the Globe.

In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Harvard President Drew Faust said that she will have the case reviewed by a panel that oversees the newly established electronic communication policies.

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