Alpha School wires teens to heart monitors for critique videos

Alpha School, a private K-12 chain that markets an AI-based teaching model in the US, has been hooking incoming high schoolers up to live heart-rate monitors in front of their classmates and playing pre-recorded videos of their own parents berating them, Futurism reported, citing a new investigation by education policy writer and cognitive scientist Benjamin Riley.

The exercise is one component of an eight-week admissions bootcamp students must pass "to secure their spot on the roster." Futurism, summarizing Riley's account, described the process as "more akin to hazing than high school orientation." One participant said his resting heart rate was 80 beats per minute and he had to stay within 10 percent of that while the video played. "Anything above 88 was a fail," he said. "I ended up averaging 87bpm. Barely made the cutoff by one single beat, and my hands were shaking the entire rest of the afternoon."

Other bootcamp tasks include starting a new X account with a minimum of 100 organic followers and a paid X Premium subscription, taking on an "unglamorous job with zero pay" (the examples cited are mucking horse stalls, cleaning grease traps, and scrubbing gas-station bathrooms), completing an entire unit of an Advanced Placement course with AI chatbots only and passing the exam within just five days, and, per one 14-year-old student, surviving three days in unfamiliar wilderness "with only 3 bags of rice and a tent."

Audrey Watters, an educator and writer, told Futurism that "Alpha School's promises have always been mostly snake-oil" and that "there's an absence of any moral compass at all."

Alpha School did not defend the practices on the record. A spokesperson responded only that "we ask that you weigh the ethics of identifying minors in this way in your reporting, and we expect any published piece to protect their identities." Three AI voices in our Who's Who directory had shared the Futurism piece by the day after it ran.