During my spring semester at Florida State University last year, I took an art history course that met at 10 a.m. in a lecture hall across campus - at a location prohibitively distant from my dormitory at that point in my life. Apart from quiz and test dates, I showed up to the class exactly three times that semester: the first day of syllabus overview, the second day when I realized the professor was reading directly from PowerPoint presentations posted online and the third day midway through the semester when I found an attendance policy in the syllabus.
The policy stipulated that more than three absences from the class would reduce your grade by a full letter. I asked the professor after class whether she planned to enforce the policy. "What grade do you have right now?" she asked. I told her I had a 99.3 percent, and she told me not to worry about it; when assignment grades were posted at the end of the semester I received a 100 percent in participation.
Did we really even need to have that conversation? Could we go one step further and not have the attendance policy? I read that syllabus right before a barbecue and became the first person to frown while eating ice cream cake. It ruined my day. I will not argue for the right to blow off a class as egregiously as I did, but I really hate attendance policies. I have never had my grade buoyed by an attendance component of the grade distribution; rather, I have only had to worry that I had surpassed the limit of acceptable absences.
The simplest but most powerful argument against attendance policies is that I am an adult and am therefore responsible for my own academic performance. If I will fail a class because I do not attend, let me fail! Do not worry - I will know whose fault it was. Some would say that I, as an adult, should show up to all my classes, so an attendance policy should never be an issue. I would respond that, generally speaking, I do not miss class unless the instructor has given me a reason not to attend each day. In the extreme example above, I realized the second day that I would only miss a few cat jokes by missing lecture. If I am in a big class and the lectures are uninformative, I might skip four times over the course of a semester. When that happens I do not want to haggle with a professor about whether we could waive an attendance policy.
I think that is what I dislike about attendance policies so much - they feel so superfluous. I am compelled to show up to a class not because it is interesting or informative, but to fulfill an arbitrary measurement of my performance that the above example demonstrates could just as easily not exist.
Certainly, there are circumstances in which attendance can reasonably be factored into your grade. Language and seminar courses, for example, generally depend on the active participation of students to progress smoothly, so I can understand why a professor might make attendance a large component of his evaluation of a student's academic performance. I only object to the attendance policies of classes with more than, say, 50 people. In those classes, the only person affected by my absence is myself. If you want to make attendance a component of your evaluation in that situation, make your lectures so important that no student could consider missing class without adverse consequences.
In that line of logic, I fully support the mechanisms that ensure attendance such as pop quizzes or mandatory prepared responses to class readings. These are methods that not only promote attendance, but also active engagement with course materials. Although midterms, finals and papers should still constitute the bulk of a grade distribution, these small assignments actually are a real evaluation of your abilities and effort. This method is an improvement on attendance policies in two important ways: Students receive feedback on how well they understand the course material, and professors receive feedback on whether they need to adjust their presentation of course material. With suitable alternatives, there is no reason we should still be enforcing unwieldy attendance policies.
Travis Ortiz's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at t.ortiz@cavalierdaily.com.
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