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For the past decade, university arms races have centered on who can build the most luxurious dorms and biggest sports facilities or offer the most “country club” amenities like posh gyms and pools. But the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign may have cornered what has become the most crucial amenity of all as the 2020 school year kicks off: COVID testing.

After receiving FDA emergency use authorization for its saliva test shortly before classes were scheduled to begin, the university—located about two hours south of Chicago—has implemented one of the most aggressive and comprehensive COVID testing and tracking programs in the nation, and is offering a hybrid model of in-person and virtual classes. “We don’t like this virus. We want to crush it, and that’s what we’re doing, and we’re doing it on a massive scale,” university president Timothy Killeen told CNBC on Friday.

The testing is so widespread on campus that UIUC tests represented 20% of all tests administered in the state of Illinois and 1.5% of all tests administered nationwide, according to a recent column in the Chicago Sun-Times by Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Janet A. Jokela, a dean at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign.

As the authors wrote, the approach too many other educational institutions are taking has a fatal flaw: “Many schools are testing students only upon their arrival to campus, and one week later. Then they are waiting for students to show symptoms before they test again. This strategy is a formula for disaster, given that a majority of infected students will be asymptomatic or display only mild symptoms.” The authors go on to say that a modest positivity rate of 2% of individuals arriving on campus will result in 500 to 900 initial infections. If those cases aren’t swiftly caught and the individuals quarantined, the virus will spread unfettered.

Universities such as UNC–Chapel Hill, Michigan State, and Notre Dame have already canceled or temporarily halted in-person classes after experiencing such community spread. Others such as Stanford and Harvard elected to cancel in-person classes entirely.

How UIUC’s testing works

Here’s how the UIUC system is set up. Each person who comes to campus gets an initial test, then must get tested twice a week. A negative test result within the past four days is linked to your ID via a university-developed tracking app, and without that green light you won’t be admitted to university buildings.