Living with your own absence policy

I see lots of comments that I myself would have made a couple years ago. “They’re adults.” and “I’m not here to monitor their attendance.” “They will pay for it in their grade anyway.” and so on… I can only envy those who still make those statements as they have clearly not attempted to consistently conduct an engaged lecture with only 5 or so of their 30ish students in attendance. I suppose I could continue to not grade attendance (though I am required by departmental policies to track attendance), but that would require me to learn to talk to myself and the board way more than I care to. :-\

I meant to mention in my comment above that while I think it’s my students’ responsibility to attend, I do keep an eye out for students in trouble, who often stop attending classes. My guess that’s why Kerri’s university tracks student absences, since increased absences can be a sign of more serious problems for a student. I’m quite happy to report such things, because if a dean can see that a student has been skipping class and that the student’s RA is worried about him, for instance, then the dean has more reason to intervene and see what’s up.

I’m another who can not grade on attendance. Personally, I don’t care whether or not the students attend. I explain that their attendance does correlate to how well they do in the class, as they can’t depend on classmates’ notes to sustain them, etc. I do give them participation points. Basically, if they are prepared, alert, and try to contribute respectfully, they get all ten points. Someone has to screw up royally to get their participation grade reduced by more than two points– that’s mostly for being disruptive, sleeping through class, never bringing the textbook.

The only reason I bother to take attendance is because I get asked by administrators when certain students last attended my class. I have no idea why I get asked that…I do not think it’s the university’s job to babysit or try tracking students down.

Guy, I wonder if that’s a reflection of different student cultures at different institutions? I don’t have that kind of absentee problem, but I teach in a small school where students are close knit and it seems there’s a certain amount of peer pressure to attend class, but I certainly could see the necessity of a more rigid attendance policy if that were not the case.

Perhaps we need a PH post on grading participation. I don’t grade it because I haven’t been able to conceptualize a coherent policy on it, and if I can’t articulate it to students, then I don’t do it. I’m happy with the level of participation in my classes, but I would be curious to know how people who grade participation do it. Or, more accurately, I’d be curious to know how people articulate their grading of participation to students.

At our school, we are not “allowed” to fail a student due to attendance. Many of us have gone to a “Daily Assignment” or online quiz that is only available to students attending the day’s class. I usually drop 2 or 3 of these assignments to cover the “excused” absences. It also eliminates the need for students to develop excuses and is easy to enforce.

I personally do not feel it is my job to babysit the students and “force” them to come to class, but giving them incentives in the form of study tools can be valuable.

I’m conducting a little experiment this semester on the impact of attendance policies on attendance. First, it’s important to know whether students pay attention to the policies. Second, I would prefer a policy that encouraged attendance without immediate reward or punishment. Attendance, IMHO, should be a volitional act.

I’m so glad you posted this, as I’m struggling with an attendance issue right now. My policy is very clear, and it’s similar to the one you posted. I’ve had a student (or a few) who have had children with H1N1, they’ve had it themselves, they’ve had deaths in the family, they’ve had car problems, they’ve had scheduling issues with a spouse . . . the list goes on (and on and on). How can one person (or several persons) experience such stress and upheaval in life and still get the work done? I don’t know. How can one person (me) be expected to “excuse” these and not fail the student? I don’t know that, either.

To be clear, I also don’t make a distinction between “excused” and “unexcused” absences (the only exception: university sanctioned absences are “excused”), but I’ve always stated if that a student has a serious problem (health, family, whatever) to let me know about it and we’ll work out a solution together. Some students, however, seem to take this as an acknowledgment that I don’t really mean what I state about absences, that if they have 6 in a T/TH class, they will fail.

I don’t know if there is a solution to this kind of problem. A friend of mind– a social scientist– never takes attendance, so this isn’t a problem for her. But when one teaching writing . . . well, you have to attend class to benefit of workshops, peer reviews, conferences, etc.

I do not include attendance as part of the grade, so I have never actually tried what I am about to suggest; I have, however, tried this with almost every other course policy.

Suggestion: why not have the students decide what the policy is at the beginning of the semester? I do this with most of my class policies, and it works really well. I find that if you explain your goals (e.g. “In order for me to get a sense of how much you know, you need to be in class.”), the students come up with very reasonable responses.

The main advantages are:
-Students will know the policy, since they helped create it.
-Studies are showing that increasing student autonomy increases student learning. After all, no one really likes being told what to do.
-Part of our goal is to teach students how to make reasonable decisions, and this is more practice for them.
-Students often have good ideas I never would have thought of.
-It builds classroom community, since they have to work together to decide the policy.
-Frankly, I have shorter syllabus to write before the semester. I just include what we are about to learn, and then fill in the policies as we create them.

The main disadvantages are:
-It takes a bit of class time (it normally takes me about 40 minutes to basically write all of the course policies).
-The professor has to be comfortable giving up some amount of control.
-Hypothetically, the students could make ridiculous requests, making the whole process a waste of time. This has never happened to me, though.

I find that my students are happier when they have a say, and I have gotten to a place where I don’t need to have everything done “my way.” It makes for some adjusting on my part at times, but I find that it is ultimately worth it.

I don’t know about other disciplines, but in mathematics absenteeism is self-punishing. Catching up for an hour of missed class takes the students much more than an hour of their own time. And if they don’t master the material from the missed class, it will certainly come back to bite them when the exams roll around. Furthermore I tell them that I won’t re-teach them the missed material in my office hours, so they are really on their own. (If it is an excused absence I encourage them to get notes from classmate, read them, and bring to me specific questions they had about the material.) Consequently, I do not deduct points for missed classes.

My MA institution, where I first started teaching, had the same policy as John indicated above — and instructors took action in similar ways. At my PhD institution, the English Department has a policy of 5 absences = failure in comp classes, and I think there’s some sort of similar policy in all other classes, but many instructors don’t adhere to that policy for various reasons. Since my classes were well-attended at the school in which no attendance policy existed, I kept that up at my new school and now at the branch campus where I teach.

My “policy” reads as such: “Attendance and participation in the classroom is expected. You should come to class prepared to engage in discussion with your instructor and classmates. Preparation includes having given full attention to the material we will be discussing, and having questions in mind when you come to class. I do not have a policy regarding automatic failure of class for a certain number of absences. But be a reasonable human being and assume that if you miss a lot of class, you will lose a lot of participation points as well as generally missing out on actual course content, which is never good for your grade.”

Then I show them the Excel spreadsheet in which I show them exactly how each class they miss directly lowers their grade by approximately 0.4%, not to mention the course content & discussions that they miss. I don’t know if any of that really makes a difference, but the average number of absences in all the sections I’ve taught (everywhere) is just under 3 and I don’t have to deal with excused vs unexcused or expend any other mental energy on it. If I start seeing a ton of absences then I’ll readjust, but right now this works for me.

For my classes, attendance is a component of participation; if you miss the chance to be present and contribute to discussion, then that’s going to adversely affect the overall grade. (Thus, I too do not distinguish between “excused” and “unexecused” absences – whatever the reason is, it’s up to the student to find ways to compensate for that absence.)

Two other points, which I don’t think anyone else has made. For me, taking attendance serves two purposes that aren’t grade-related. One is that, by dint of calling out the students’ names every week, I get a better sense of who my students are, so when they participate in class discussions, I can identify and credit them correctly. The other is that it helps me identify students who are struggling (or who have informally withdrawn from the course) so that I can pass on word to the support services on campus. (We have a very pro-active approach to student retention here – I’m expected to report on student performance and attendance.)

The other point is this: some institutions require you to take attendance, and some go further to specify how many days a student can miss. A lot of our students are on financial aid, for example, that requires them to be full-time students – and that status is not counted simply in terms of enrollment – they have to be actively involved in their classes as well. If I can’t clearly describe a student’s attendance to the support service people, especially if that student is on academic probation for non-attendance in previous classes, I’m not doing my job.

The attendance policy is a pain, but it’s a minor one. Dealing with late work, on the other hand… oy.

I have always felt that if a student is mature enough to be attending university, then he/she is mature enough to take responsibility for his/her own attendance. In other words, if you want to skip all of my classes and try to ace the exam, you are free to do so. I can pretty much guarantee that this will not happen, but you are free to try.

That having been said, I have made use of in-class projects or quizzes, etc., that do count towards the final grade. So if a student chooses to skip class, not only will she miss out on information that will be included on the exam, she will also miss a few marks.

Ultimately I see university students as adults and treat them accordingly. I do make it absolutely clear that attending class will ultimately benefit their grade as they will actually learn stuff (!) but if a student decides for whatever reason that going to class is not a priority, that is their decision.

I was the victim of a tight absentee policy when I was an undergrad in the 60′s, so I vowed never to do that to my students. I told them I wasn’t there to monitor their presence. If they could do all the work to a satisfactory level without coming to class, more power to them. I thought it was my job to make class worth coming to.

For me, minimal participation is showing up and sitting politely in class (which would put a student who does only that in the C range for participation). B range requires being actively engaged in discussions at least some of the time; A range requires being a regular contributor who not only speaks frequently but who also makes relevant, thoughtful comments (as opposed to talking to hear themselves talk) and is considerate of their classmates while doing so.

I explain to students that participation matters because the class simply does not work if a bunch of unprepared people just show up and stare at me, nor does it work if only two or three take up the burden of upholding class discussion while the rest of the class coasts. Basically, the point I make overall is that learning is active and that the best way to get your money’s worth out of the class is to be engaged in the whole process. (An analogy that sometimes works is that if you’re paying someone to teach you to play the guitar, you don’t expect to spend your lessons just listening to the teacher and the other students play, and then expect to be able to play yourself at the end of it.)

That said, tracking participation with rigor can be tricky. I make a point of getting the names of my students straight as early as possible, so that I can make notes during discussions as to who said what, when, how often (relying on one’s memory for this is a bad idea – the loud student who talks all the time tends to stick out more in memory than the quiet one who says something devastatingly brilliant once a class). I also make note of which students come to office hours, which ones bother to do optional revisions, which ones post thoughtful comments in the forums and which ones do not (and which ones bother to comment on other students’ comments as well) and so on.

I put participation in my grading breakdown partly to ensure that the class functions, partly to reward those students who are putting in the effort (even if their other skills aren’t up to producing high-quality assignments), and partly to emphasize the importance of participation relative to other work in the class. (I weight it more heavily for a senior seminar than for a first-year lecture course, for example.)

I’ve never had any students question the validity of grading participation – only concern that they understand the standards I’m using when assigning grades.

I’m so glad you posted this, as I’m struggling with an attendance issue right now. My policy is very clear, and it’s similar to the one you posted. I’ve had a student (or a few) who have had children with H1N1, they’ve had it themselves, they’ve had deaths in the family, they’ve had car problems, they’ve had scheduling issues with a spouse . . . the list goes on (and on and on). How can one person (or several persons) experience such stress and upheaval in life and still get the work done? I don’t know. How can one person (me) be expected to “excuse” these and not fail the student? I don’t know that, either.

This is pretty much where I am at as well. My policy is 3-5 absences are acceptable, but students got to that mark VERY quickly. Many who did have legit reasons for being out of class. Many don’t. I don’t really have a proper answer for any of this yet.