It's the April 2025 exam system and it's clear to me that the Student ID system here at YorkU is completely broken. I've previously written about how silly it was to rely on cell phones as ID cards. And, in parallel to this, the administration at YorkU has also permitted the use of just about any other photo ID card that the student wants.
So, now, without training or any proper resourcing, faculty and other employees are expected to simply trust that students are who they are. It's now normal for me to see driver's licences from any number of countries, in addition to passports, medical cards, generic Ontario Photo Cards, etc. as ID during exams.
The end result of this "anything goes" approach to student IDs means that identity verification is next to impossible now.
But, fear not, intrepid readers: YorkU's management has a solution to our concerns: the Validate website, https://validate.yucard.yorku.ca.
Here, you can type in a student's ID number or their name and it is supposed to provide you with their photo. In concept, this is a potentially workable solution, except I've uncovered two failures:
- Common names crash the site.
- Students refuse to upload photos
These two reasons highlight the ongoing failure of the cell phone ID system. I won't even get into the nonsense of permitting students to have their cell phones on their desks during exams.
The Common Name Crash
Try typing in a common name like Smith or Mohammad in to the "validate" website. The first page will turn up fine. But ask for a second page of results (as is commonly the case with common names) and you'll get this error:
I reported this failure mode to management months ago. I even did this on a Zoom call so that I could make sure that the message was heard and understood. I was assured that it would be fixed. It has not been.
Students without Photos
In a bid to assuage faculty concerns about the wide variety of IDs, we have been assured, by management, that students' identities should be verifiable using external tools, including a "Validate" website, https://validate.yucard.yorku.ca. The idea is that you can type in the student ID number or their name and, then, a photo is supposed to pop up that can be checked against the person sitting at the exam desk.
What management failed to tell faculty is that students are not required to provide their photos to the University. And, so, we now have many student files that have no photo, thereby invalidating the "validate" website. During my last exam, I found multiple students with no photos on the validate site:
Conclusion: bring back physical University ID cards.
The move to cell phone IDs was done without faculty consultation. It was done without an understanding of how exams are conducted and what restrictions faculty and teaching assistants work under. The band-aids that have been applied have not worked. This is because the system is fundamentally flawed.
It's time to accept that cell phone IDs has failed. We need to accept the failure and go back to a universal, physical ID system, like what high schools, colleges, and universities have been doing around the world for decades.
James Andrew Smith is a Professional Engineer and Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of York University’s Lassonde School, with degrees in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Alberta and McGill University. Previously a program director in biomedical engineering, his research background spans robotics, locomotion, human birth, music and engineering education. While on sabbatical in 2018-19 with his wife and kids he lived in Strasbourg, France and he taught at the INSA Strasbourg and Hochschule Karlsruhe and wrote about his personal and professional perspectives. James is a proponent of using social media to advocate for justice, equity, diversity and inclusion as well as evidence-based applications of research in the public sphere. You can find him on Twitter. You can find him on BlueSky. Originally from Québec City, he now lives in Toronto, Canada.