Jan 10, 2007

Mandatory Attendance Policies

College classrooms: should they have mandatory attendance policies? Should college students be penalized for not showing up to classes they are paying for? Is it condescending to pass around an attendance sheet to a room full of young adults?

I'm not sure how I feel about attendance policies in the college classroom. When I first started teaching, as a wide-eyed idealistic young educator, I opposed attendance policies. I've always been rebellious when it comes to rules, and I didn't want to impose this rule on my students. I wanted to have a room full of excited students who couldn't wait to discuss the 80 pages of reading that they had read every word of. Blah blah blah.

Thing is, my idealistic desire to not impose rules conflicted with another idealistic desire. I've always believed that classrooms should not be places where the all-powerful professor deposits information into the minds of passive students. (Paolo Freire called this the "banking model" of education.) Real learning happens when students are presented with information and theories and ideas and then try to make sense of it all through discussion with the professor and the other students. The classroom should be a space where students help each other question their own ideologies and the norms of their society.

To have a great class discussion, though, there needs to be a strong sense of community in the classroom. Students need to feel that they are mutually responsible for contributing to this community. And needless to say, this sense of community is contingent upon students actually being there.

So, a few years ago, I started enforcing an attendance policy, complete with a daily attendance sheet that I passed around the room. My policy was pretty lenient, at least in my opinion. Students had four free days off for whatever reason-- sickness, family emergency, desperate need to hit the snooze button, whatever. After that, points were deducted from their grade, unless they informed me of a good reason why they had to miss more than four classes.

This was a bear to enforce. I always had students who tried to negotiate points with me or claimed they had forgotten to sign the attendance sheet. One student came to my office, baffled at all the points he was losing for attendance. "I was there all the time!" he insisted. "I only missed ten classes all semester." (No, I'm not exaggerating.) I didn't know what to say to him or how to communicate with someone with such a different concept of education than my own.

With the attendance policy, I felt like I was betraying all my idealism. I was imposing a rule, and I was not creating a sense of community. I had become a police officer. So I ditched the attendance policy. Last semester, attendance was decent in my 10 a.m. class, but lousy in my 8 a.m. class. Surprise surprise.

I suppose the problem is that attendance policies are a band-aid on a much bigger educational problem. In our anti-intellectual culture, there are all kinds of ways that the system discourages classroom communities of learners and encourages students to do as little as possible to get by. Does this mean there should be attendance policies, or that there should not be? I don't know.

Students, teachers, other readers, I want to hear from you, so please participate in the discussion below. What do you think about attendance policies in college?