This university is making all of its freshmen wear FitBits


Students at Oklahoma's Oral Roberts University have always had to monitor their fitness for grades, but this school year administrators took things one step further, The Washington Post reports.
Each of the religious school's 900 freshman is required to wear a FitBit. A school computer logs each student's steps and heart rate data. To pass that portion of health and physical education classes, everyone must average 10,000 steps per day and 150 minutes of intense activity per week.
"ORU offers one of the most unique educational approaches in the world by focusing on the whole person — mind, body, and spirit," the university president told Tulsa World in a January interview.
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Aside from any privacy concerns, there's also the matter of how people with eating disorders stand to adjust to a mandatory FitBit requirement.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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