The Focus Score

The laptop camera was supposed to be invisible once you got used to it, according to the assembly where the school had introduced FocusScore back in September. It tracked eye movement and posture during class, converted both into a number between zero and a hundred, and sent a weekly summary to parents. Emeka had stopped thinking about the little green light above his screen within a week. What he hadn't stopped noticing was that his score kept dropping on exactly the days he felt he had understood the most.

Kamera laptop itu seharusnya tak terasa lagi begitu kita terbiasa, begitu kata asesmen di aula saat sekolah memperkenalkan FocusScore pada bulan September. Kamera itu melacak gerakan mata dan postur tubuh selama pelajaran, mengubah keduanya menjadi angka antara nol sampai seratus, lalu mengirim ringkasan mingguan kepada orang tua. Emeka sudah berhenti memikirkan lampu hijau kecil di atas layarnya dalam waktu seminggu. Yang tak berhenti ia sadari adalah skornya terus turun justru pada hari-hari ketika ia merasa paling banyak memahami pelajaran.

"Forty-one," he said, showing Sana his phone at lunch. "Tuesday. That was the lecture on radiative cooling. I filled four pages."

"Empat puluh satu," katanya sambil menunjukkan ponselnya kepada Sana saat makan siang. "Hari Selasa. Itu pelajaran tentang pendinginan radiasi. Aku mengisi empat halaman."

Sana, who sat one row behind him, didn't need to ask why. "You take notes on paper. The camera reads that as you looking down and away. It doesn't know you're writing — it just knows you're not looking at the slide."

Sana, yang duduk satu baris di belakangnya, tak perlu bertanya kenapa. "Kamu mencatat di kertas. Kamera membacanya sebagai kamu menunduk dan menoleh ke arah lain. Kamera itu tidak tahu kamu sedang menulis, dia cuma tahu kamu tidak menatap slide."

"So the day I actually paid the least attention —"

"Jadi hari ketika aku paling tidak memperhatikan…"

"Was the day you probably scored highest, yeah. Because you were staring at the screen the whole time." She said this without much guilt, which was, Emeka thought, either admirable or slightly alarming.

"Itu hari ketika kamu mungkin mendapat skor paling tinggi, iya. Soalnya kamu menatap layar terus." Sana mengatakannya tanpa rasa bersalah, dan menurut Emeka itu entah patut dikagumi atau sedikit mengkhawatirkan.

Had the software been built to tell handwriting from distraction, none of this would have been necessary. Since it hadn't, fixing the surface problem would have been easy enough: type his notes instead, keep his eyes on the slide, let the number climb back to wherever it was supposed to sit. What stopped him was less the principle of the thing than a very specific dread. A counselor had already emailed his mother twice about his "engagement pattern," and a third email, he suspected, would trigger an actual meeting. There he would have to explain, in front of two adults, a note-taking habit that had nothing wrong with it at all.

Seandainya perangkat lunak itu dibuat untuk membedakan tulisan tangan dari kelengahan, semua ini tak perlu terjadi. Karena tidak demikian, menyelesaikan masalah di permukaan sebenarnya mudah saja: ketik saja catatannya, arahkan mata ke slide, biarkan angkanya naik kembali ke tempat yang seharusnya. Yang menahannya bukan prinsip, melainkan rasa takut yang sangat spesifik. Seorang konselor sudah dua kali mengirim email kepada ibunya tentang "pola keterlibatan" Emeka, dan email ketiga, ia curiga, akan memicu pertemuan sungguhan. Di sana ia harus menjelaskan di depan dua orang dewasa tentang kebiasaan mencatat yang sama sekali tidak ada salahnya.

So instead of typing, he and Sana built a case. She photographed all four pages of Tuesday's notes, time-stamped against the lecture recording, and lined up three other low-scoring days the same way. Each one, it turned out, was a day he'd written by hand rather than typed. Not until they laid the pages next to the transcript, sentence for sentence, did the pattern become impossible to argue with. Every "distraction" the software had logged corresponded to a moment he was, in fact, writing down exactly what the teacher had just said.

Jadi alih-alih mengetik, ia dan Sana menyusun sebuah pembuktian. Sana memotret keempat halaman catatan hari Selasa itu, mencocokkannya dengan waktu pada rekaman pelajaran, lalu menyusun tiga hari lain dengan skor rendah dengan cara yang sama. Ternyata setiap hari itu adalah hari ketika Emeka menulis dengan tangan, bukan mengetik. Baru setelah mereka menjajarkan halaman-halaman itu dengan transkrip, kalimat demi kalimat, polanya menjadi mustahil dibantah. Setiap "kelengahan" yang dicatat perangkat lunak itu bertepatan dengan saat ia memang sedang menulis persis apa yang baru saja diucapkan guru.

Their teacher, to her credit, didn't need much convincing once she saw it laid out. She forwarded the evidence to the counselor's office herself, along with a note suggesting the system's threshold get reviewed for anyone who took notes by hand. Emeka's score for that week came back unchanged, since the algorithm itself couldn't be edited retroactively, but the follow-up email his mother received afterward said something different this time: a correction, not a concern. He kept writing on paper. He just stopped assuming the camera would ever learn to tell the difference.

Guru mereka, patut dipuji, tak butuh banyak bujukan setelah melihat buktinya tersaji. Ia sendiri yang meneruskan bukti itu ke kantor konselor, disertai catatan yang menyarankan agar ambang batas sistem itu ditinjau ulang bagi siapa pun yang mencatat dengan tangan. Skor Emeka minggu itu tetap tidak berubah, karena algoritmanya tak bisa diubah secara surut, tetapi email lanjutan yang kemudian diterima ibunya kali ini berisi hal yang berbeda: sebuah koreksi, bukan kekhawatiran. Emeka terus menulis di atas kertas. Ia hanya berhenti berharap kamera itu akan pernah belajar membedakannya.