The university, ranked sixth nationally, announced on Nov 4 that it would discontinue calculating students' “head‑up rates,” a metric meant to gauge classroom engagement. The move matters because it directly responds to student privacy worries about AI surveillance.

The decision came after screenshots of live classroom footage showed real‑time attendance and attentiveness statistics, prompting criticism over facial recognition, personal data collection and the lack of student consent. Students argued that the images revealed too much about them without permission.

The school spent more than 30 million yuan ($4.5 million) upgrading its smart classroom system. The AI‑driven platform can count students, record attendance and measure attentiveness through head‑up rates.

The university defended the broader system as a tool to improve teaching quality. Nevertheless, students remained worried that facial‑recognition technology could expose their biometric data to the university and private firms.

The controversy highlights wider concerns about the growing use of AI‑powered monitoring systems in Chinese higher education. It shows that privacy and consent can drive policy changes in campus technology.