Gage Counts
Management junior & Managing Editor for Electronic Properties
Universities are often criticized for sacrificing the quality of their education due to coddling millennials, making them incapable of functioning in the world outside of their ivory towers. While trigger warnings and safe spaces have received much more negative attention in the past year than they ever have, one common policy in higher education that the critics forget to mention is mandatory attendance policies. Here are several reasons why it’s a mistake to leave those out.
Attendance policies inflate student grades.
Professors will often make attendance a graded portion of the class, equaling up to an entire letter grade or more. Several professors I’ve taken classes with value attendance as much as they do an exam. Attendance can even be the sole determinant of whether a student passes
a class.
Grading exists to gauge student mastery of the content in their classes. If attendance—which can’t make students pay attention in class, much less ensure they’re absorbing the material—takes up 15 to 20 percent of someone’s score, that skews the measure of whether they actually mastered the content.In other words, graded attendance policies are to college degrees what margins of errors are to polls or surveys. We don’t accept a 15 percent margin of error for polls measuring an election, so we shouldn’t accept a 15 percent margin of error measuring the value of a degree.
Some classes might actually not be worth attending.
Every student will at some point in their college education be required to take a course that has no relevance to their degree of choice because of (inflated) common curriculum requirements or because the class is poorly taught.
In microeconomic theory, there’s a term called opportunity cost, which explains that by making one decision, you miss out on the benefits you could have gotten if you made a different decision. So, the opportunity cost of attending a class because there’s a mandatory attendance policy in place outweighs making the final edits on a paper due in another class or attending another professor’s office hours. College is supposed to teach critical decision making, so why do we penalize students for making a decision to spend their time wisely?
Professors don’t know that they need to improve their classes if students don’t have the choice of skipping them.
If the only way professors can get students to attend their classes is by deducting points from their grades as a threat, that’s a sign that those professors don’t know how to make classes interesting or relevant to students.
Loyola does require students to submit course evaluations at the end of each semester, but they don’t always give the professors their uncensored opinion about their class. So, to solve this problem, professors should want to know whether students really think attending their class is important.
Academic literature shows that attendance policies don’t make students more successful.
Some of my professors might read this and think I’m just trying to excuse my poor attendance in their classes, but this point is substantiated by numerous academic studies. One study showed the real quality that makes students successful is their level of motivation, but since mandatory attendance policies don’t make them more motivated, they don’t help students perform better in the class. Others have shown similar findings: attendance policies are a band-aid, not an actual solution to poor attendance.
If the landscape of American higher education is changing and universities as we know them are on their way out, attendance policies should be looked at as one of the many nails in that coffin. They’re a symptom of Millennials being a “participation trophy generation,” where we feel entitled to an easy letter grade or having our professors hold our hands as we complete their courses. It’s no wonder our professors feel like mandatory attendance policies are the only way we’ll actually come to class. If universities want to actually form the minds of students instead of having student attitudes form the policies of the classes, it’s time we start doing away with graded attendance policies.
