Attendance policies baby students-time to grow up By: Jason De Thomas UNC Connection March 24, 2008 UNC currently

has their teachers use an attendance policy designed to keep students attending classes, but in my opinion, we need to stop being babied by the school and mom's apron strings need to be cut. It's about time we were allowed to grow up. While the school has no official attendance policy, the honor code and code of conduct more than allow for them to get around it through requiring students to follow their teacher's rules, which invariably contain attendance policies. The policies are designed to keep students from failing, which looks terrible on the school's records, and further designed to keep those students from dropping out, which looks even worse. If you're paying your own way through college, that's an abhorrent waste of money, and if your parents are paying, how many parents are going to continue to do so if you fail all your classes? Very few. So the school has teachers use attendance policies. I even had a professor tell me once that it costs us $18 per class, per day to attend college--so ditching is akin to throwing away almost $20 bucks a class. Some teachers simply don't care. If you do well on the assignments and tests, so be it, you get the grade you earn. Others are sticklers for the policies, and regardless of good marks earned, will flunk you if you miss more than three days. That's quite a range of attitudes, and finding the right teacher to suit your attendance habits is tricky indeed. Teachers have many methods of keeping track of attendance-and the methods are distinctly different from large, introductory classes or higher-level, more specific and smaller classes. Obviously in the smaller courses, professors can easily get to know the students by name or facethey can also simply call roll every day, since it doesn't take that long. Larger classes are different, and teachers must resort to other methods. In one of my classes this semester, the teacher is a stickler for attendance, regardless of having over 120 students. In his efforts to maintain attendance, he resorted to e-Instruction and the use of "clickers." Clickers are these stupid little remote's that we have to take to class every day, and at the end of class our teacher asks us questions, which we must respond to with the clicker to get attendance points. That's all. The questions are not graded, so we can answer "E" even if "E" is not a choice and still get attendance points. We don't even have to answer all the questions, we can simply answer one and get full credit. Now, don't get me wrong--this is fine. I go to class, I get the points. Simple right? Yea, I thought so too. Well, it just so happens that the other day a girl announced that her clicker hadn't worked the past seven times she'd been in class, so she didn't receive the points. Our teacher said there was a one in 100 chance that a clicker wouldn't work on a given day, so that's one person per class in a room with a hundred students. We have about 130, so there's a 1.3 percent chance that a clicker won't work that day for any given student. The chances that hers was the one that didn't work seven times in a row are astronomical. So her complaining about not getting the points for attendance, even when she was there, caused the professor to re-think his strategy. He suggested throwing out the clicker points completely, not using them, and instead taking a quiz every week where the questions would actually be graded. Meaning, if you got something wrong, it counted against you. This is a far cry from the "laid-back, press a button on the remote and get your points" approach that I enjoyed so much. So that got me thinking. I paid $20 bucks for this clicker. And then I paid another $10 bucks to "register" it for the semester. So if he throws them out, I'm out $30 bucks and so are the other 129

students in my class. That's $3,900 dollars-gone. Additionally, the fact that her clicker didn't work seven times in a row and she never said anything the other six times is a little curious. Why didn't she inform the teacher the first time and get the points that day, instead of waiting for two weeks? I think she just said that because she hadn't come in seven classes, but that's just my opinion. Furthermore, if the teacher throws out the clicker points and institutes these weekly quizzes, that still doesn't assure him that we all came every single day, because the quizzes are weekly-we could just study the PowerPoint notes he puts on Blackboard every week. So that would eliminate the usefulness of the attendance policy altogether. Our teacher hasn't decided yet, but this situation got me thinking about the attendance policies here at UNC. If our teachers put the notes online, then what's the point of going to class? If I can wake up at 11 instead of 9 and glance at the notes in 20 minutes instead of an hour-what's the harm? Especially if I continue to maintain good marks. Why should I have to go all the way over to the building, sit in class and wait for the teacher, and then wait all period for the clicker questions? For example, if you were taking a course for grade forgiveness that you had already taken, do you think you would need as much preparation as students seeing the material for the first time? Well, it always depends, but usually not-usually you would remember certain things and the knowledge would come faster than the other students, if only because you had seen in one time before. In the same vein, if you could come into a class knowing all the material and just take the tests, that would save a ton of time. So-why the attendance policies? They allow students to test out of certain subjects without attending a single class, so why are we forced to attend other classes, even if we already know the material or are able to learn it without attending every day? Some have suggested that a teacher's pride is one reason-the teachers who really pay attention to it either really love their subject or get upset if students don't attend, thinking it's a personal insult to them or their profession. I can understand that, after all, I would feel pretty down to have worked my whole life to be a teacher, only to not have students come for whatever reason. Attendance policies are a good way to fix this, I guess. Another reason could be because, as mentioned earlier, failing grades and high drop-out rates are bad for the school's reputation, so they require students to attend to help ensure more passing grades. This is also very understandable-after all, UNC can't have another 10% drop in enrollment like they did this year-the budget cuts could be devastating. But after these two, the ideas quickly fall short. These seem to be the only possible reasons for attendance policies. Indeed, there are even some teachers who have attendance policies simply to please management, but never enforce them. So what's the deal with that? In my opinion, yes, those explanations are fitting and fully explain the "need" for such policies, but they don't hold enough strength for me to accept them. I think if we're going to college-we're adults. I mean, we're paying thousands of dollars for this education, we don't need policies to force us to come. If we don't come, it's our own fault, and our own loss. It's time for the school to stop trying to make us behave they way they desire and let us make our own decisions. I feel like the attendance policies are like high school-if we ditch they'll call our house and leave a message. Except, here in college, they make us fail the course and waste hundreds of dollars. That's really all it amounts to. I mean, if I can go to a class five times all semester and still score A's on the exams-why must I go the rest of the time? Shouldn't our grades be linked with our academic achievements rather than simply our physical presence in the room? If someone deserves a good grade and knows the material, why should they be docked for simply not being there in person at a certain

time? After all-it's their $18 bucks a day that not only pays for the school to run, but also pays the teacher's salary (parts of it, anyway). There's really no reason besides that attendance is often linked with performance. OK-great. Often linked. But not always. If I feel like I don't get the material, then I'll go to class more. If I know it, I won't. Isn't that simple enough? Apparently not, or else attendance policies wouldn't exist. But I think it's high time we were allowed to make our own decisions. Students can easily get access to alcohol, drugs, and have lots of promiscuous, unprotected sex, but if we miss class, we're out of luck? Sounds a little weird to me, but maybe it's just me venting at the clickers and my possibly wasted $30 bucks. You tell me. Go bears.