Written by Ayesha Ilyas, Mohammed Ishraq, Nawaz Virani, and Sufian Ahmed  on April 22, 2025

Project Name: RFID-Enabled Attendance System at CCNY 

Mission: Implementing an RFID enabled attendance system for in person courses at CCNY would save valuable class time, improve data accuracy, and increase student, professor, and department accountability. Attendance data can be used to help support student success, inform course design and logistics (time, location, etc.), and evaluate professor performance. Schools which use RFID attendance systems often see better student grades. This is because real time tracking helps schools monitor who is present. It adds accountability and encourages students to attend more regularly and behave better. These positive habits lead to improved academic performance.   

Introduction 

At The City College of New York, many professors still rely on manual methods to take attendance in their in-person classes. This often involves calling out names, passing around sign in sheets or using online forms. While this may seem simple, it takes up 5 to 10 minutes of class time every session and leaves room for errors or cheating. For instance, students can sign in for friends who aren’t actually there, or names can be missed or misrecorded. These problems make it hard for professors and administrators to track who is really attending class and how often. 

The purpose of this proposal is to introduce a more accurate and time-saving solution. To solve this problem, we propose using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. RFID uses small chips inserted in student ID cards that can be scanned automatically by readers installed at classroom doors. This system would instantly record each student’s attendance as they enter the room. Research from Xanthipi Kyriazi (2019) and other case studies show that RFID systems are already helping schools around the world manage attendance more effectively and securely. It is also proven that “schools that monitored their attendance had better overall grades when compared to schools that didn’t.” When students know their attendance is tracked in real time, they are more likely to be responsible and consistent in showing up to class. 

This proposal focuses on launching the system in large classrooms here at CCNY, targeting only in-person courses for now. This system can also be integrated with other academic platforms, such as Gradescope or Brightspace, to automatically confirm student attendance or verify their presence during exams. In the following sections, we will describe how the system will work, the benefits it offers, the resources required and the total budget. 

Project Description 

RFID technology is the solution for efficient attendance tracking at The City College of New York. Students would access attendance logging through RFID readers positioned at entrances as their RFID chipped ID cards would record their presence when passing through the doors. By implementing this system professors no longer need to conduct roll calls while sign in sheets get eliminated which saves classroom learning time and reduces the opportunity for incorrect or false attendance records. 

RFID technology when introduced to the college setting will deliver multiple essential advantages to its operations. The implementation of RFID technology will create automated attendance monitoring that produces accurate recording of student presence while diminishing student misconduct in attendance systems. Real time data provides professors and administrators an opportunity to recognize attendance patterns for taking necessary measures. Student academic achievement improves because students show better attendance when they realize their attendance is tracked automatically and constantly throughout the day. 

Implementing these solutions requires upfront expenses and privacy related issues but such challenges become manageable when institutions establish proper data policies and execute system deployment step by step. A controlled classroom trial of the system will measure its effectiveness and expose any technical or logistical issues to allow their early resolution. The lack of attendance system improvement at CCNY will keep the facility from recovering instructional time while it has a tracking system through paper sheets that fails to deliver efficient and dependable attendance records.  

Budget  

For an average class size of 25 students at CCNY (Common, n.d.), the total cost of the entire RFID attendance system for one year is estimated to be as follows: 

• RFID cards 30¢ / student = $7.50 
• RFID Reader $10 
• Arduino Nano $25 ?  
• Domain name $10 ? 
• Website hosting $5 / month = $60 dollars ? 

Total: $112.50 

(Will add chart of costs on final) 

(Will add graph showing how cost changes with class size on final) 

Adopting this system in multiple classes would entail purchasing an RFID card for each new student, and an RDIF reader and Arduino Nano per class. The domain name and website hosting costs would remain constant. The below function, T, models the cost of implementing the system for multiple classes across the college: 

T(s, c) = 3s + 35c + 70, where 

• s is total number of students in the implementing classes  
• c is number of classes implementing the system 

This model demonstrates that the cost of implementation becomes more feasible as the system is increasingly adopted across the school, since the burden of the fixed cost becomes amortized across implementing classes. 

Conclusion 

References 

Common data set 2020-2021 . The City College of New York. (n.d.). https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/2021-03/CDS_2020-2021.pdf.

Dicle, M., & Levendis J. (2013). Using RFID Technology to Track Attendance. Journal for Economic Educators, 13(1), 29-38. https://libjournals.mtsu.edu/index.php/jfee/article/view/1490/1069.

Kyriazi, X., & Kyriazi, X. (2025, March 6). RFID Attendance System and How it Benefits the School Environment. Classter. https://www.classter.com/blog/edtech/rfid-attendance-system/.