Mandatory Attendance Policies
Should Professors Require College & University Students to Attend?
Come to class, or lose points. Is this a fair policy in college? Here are arguments for and against mandatory attendance policies.
Should college students be required to attend class through mandatory attendance policies? Should professors deduct points for students who miss more than a given number of absences? This can be a heated debate between students and instructors, and between instructors with different opinions as well. Here are some arguments on both side.
Arguments in Favor of Mandatory Attendance Policies
One of the main arguments in favor of requiring attendance is that good attendance is needed to develop a strong sense of community in a classroom, and to foster a healthy sense of class participation. For instructors who choose to stick with the old lecture model, this isn't an issue. However, many instructors opt to have a participatory classroom filled with discussions and activities. This kind of teaching requires quite a bit more effort, and if it works well, the experience can be very beneficial and rewarding for students. However, students have to show up for this to work and take mutual responsibility to participating in class discussion-- and failure to show up and participate hurts the experience of other students.
Another argument in favor of mandatory attendance policies goes under the "life lesson" category. In the real world, if you don't show up for work most of the time, you're going to be fired. If students get into the habit of not showing up for class with no concrete consequences, what lesson does that teach? One of the most important lessons that students need to learn in college is self-discipline, and by requiring students to come to class, students are given strong incentives to become disciplined (or at least disciplined enough to come to class).
A third argument in favor of mandatory attendance is that students generally do much better in class if they show up. In classes where class exercises and activities are a major part of the learning experience--like public speaking, or creative writing, or television production--low attendance may lead quickly to a failing grade. By forcing students to show up, their grades are likely to improve-- whether they like it or not.
Arguments Against Mandatory Attendance Policies
One of the biggest argument against attendance policies is that they are patronizing and fail to treat students as adults. Children are forced by law to attend school, but adults are not. And if you treat people like children, they may be more likely to act like children.
Related to this is one of the students' biggest complains about attendance policies. "Hey, I paid to take this class," argues a typical student. "I can choose whether or not I want to be here."
One reason many instructors dislike mandatory attendance policies is because they can be a good deal of work to enforce, and they put the teacher in the role of police officer. Whenever you have rules, people try to argue their way around them, rightfully or not.
Instructors find themselves dealing with a stream of appeals from students who claim (rightly or wrongly) to have legitimate excuses for missing class. They also find themselves dealing with long lists of students at the end of the semester who claim they were in class and forgot to sign the attendance sheet on this day or that-- a problem that can be solved by making students 100% responsible for signing the sheet each day no matter what, but this can be rather draconian.
Although many instructors applaud mandatory attendance policies because they encourage participation, others question the value of forced participation. Students who don't really want to be there-- and who may doing other work during class or texting their friends--may not have much of value to add.
In addition, some might argue that there are already consequences for not showing up to class-- a good chance of a lower grade. Through this logic, penalizing students for not showing up can be seen as double jeopardy, as they are being punished by lower test and paper scores and by a lower attendance score.
Finally, an argument against attendance policies is that some students have special issues that make attendance difficult, especially nontraditional students. A single parent may miss classes for reasons beyond his or her control. So might a student who is working full time and sometimes gets called into work during class.
Should Attendance be Mandatory?
Since most departments and schools do not have a standard attendance policy, this is a decision instructors need to make for themselves-- and it's not necessarily an easy one, especially if class participation is an important part of the course objectives. Students are adults who pay for the opportunity to come to class and patronizing people is generally bad policy. On the other hand, there are serious advantages to consider for requiring attendance.
