How attendance works
Attendance in Quorum is four things. Once you have these, every other page in this section is a detail.
Session → QR code → Check-in → Record
1. The session
A session is one meeting of your class — a lecture, a tutorial, one date and time. You start it when class starts.
A session belongs to a group, has a category — a lecture when an owner starts it, a tutorial when a TA does — and runs for a duration you set. When the duration runs out, check-in closes on its own.
2. The QR code
Quorum puts a QR code on your screen for students to scan.
The code rotates — by default a new one every 15 seconds. This is the main reason a photograph of the code is not much use: by the time it reaches someone outside the room, it has expired.
The code carries a token for this session, right now. It is not a link to your class in general.
3. The check-in
A student scans, and gets a page asking for their university ID. They type it and they are done.
That is genuinely all. Students do not have accounts, do not sign in, and do not install anything. The university ID is matched against the ones in your group.
Depending on how you set the session up, Quorum may also check:
- where they are, if you set a geofence
- which device they are on, to catch one phone checking in several people
4. The record
A successful check-in writes an attendance record. At the end you have, per student, one of four states:
| Status | Means |
|---|---|
| Present | Checked in |
| Late | Checked in after your late threshold |
| Excused | You marked them excused |
| Absent | No check-in, no override |
Every record also says where it came from: QR for a scan, MANUAL for one you set by hand.
Absent is the default. A student who does nothing ends up absent, which is usually right and is correctable when it is not.
Those four statuses are what your grading settings turn into a number.
What this model does not do
It does not authenticate students. A university ID identifies; it does not prove identity. Anyone who has a valid code and knows a classmate's ID can check that classmate in.
The controls in How Quorum stops proxy check-ins make that harder — meaningfully harder — but the honest description is "deterrent", not "proof". Knowing exactly where that line sits is what lets you use the record confidently.