Ask HN: what is the best way to get authorised data from users esp students?

[qikquestion]

I am building an app to record student data about their academic and non-academic achievements/interests. The latter part is not captured in any system and so we collect it from scratch.

The challenge is to authorise whether the data recorded by students is right. I met educational institutions/staff and it is apparent that it is a big pain which they are not willing to take.

Is there a best approach in solving this problem of collecting authentic data? Its a major hurdle in providing an useful solution and I like to understand whether similar problem in different domain is solved in any unique way which we can try out.

Also the number of students is in thousands.

[mitchelldm7]

Look at companies like CollegiateLink (www.collegiatelink.net) or Orgsync (www.orgsync.com) ... They collect this type of non-academic/participation based data and use it to, among other things, generate 'extra-curricular transcripts' for students to document the activities and organizations they participated in while in college. Might be an interesting model for your approach.

As a former student user, I vaguely remember students self declaring their affiliations/memberships, but them having to be validated by an organization contact on campus -- like an advisor or group president.

[qikquestion]

Thanks a lot. This is really useful. If I can ask " Did you enjoy filling the data during your college days? Is there something motivating/de-motivating to input data?

[mitchelldm7]

The school kept trying to motivate us by pitching the selling points of this 'activities transcript' and how it would make it easier to show prospective employers what we were up to while earning a degree... I'm not sure I particularly enjoyed it, but the system made it as easy as possible so it only took a minute. It became a less popular Facebook, basically -- you'd keep it updated just like you did your Facebook profile.

[qikquestion]

Thanks for your perspective.