<p>Maybe it's just my lame CC, but does anyone else go to a college where they actually take your attendance and factor it into your grade? I'm pretty ****ed off because I skipped 9 classes and just found out I lost lost 10 points off my grade. My fault most of the times, but the class was just so darn boring and easy, the lectures really weren't worth attending. </p>
<p>Do you think colleges should take attendance or do you think that's too "high-school-ish"?</p>
<p>I had a few classes with an attendance policy in college, but the vast majority of my classes did not take attendance.</p>
<p>Most of my classes did take attendance. It annoyed me, too, but participation is important in a lot of classes… it does take away from the course if nobody shows up.</p>
<p>You will likely find that the smaller the class size the more likely that the prof will take attendance. Seminars and smaller discussion-based sections can’t function properly if no one shows up. That said, some professors of larger lectures also take attendance, so you need to check your syllabus carefully to determine if it will be part of the grading metric. Professors who require attendance will generally make that fact very clear, but if you have any doubt you should just ask at the beginning of the semester.</p>
<p>Yep, most of mine have as well. Even my larger classes.</p>
<p>in classes where participation is part of the grade, it’s not even necessary to take attendance…you can’t be credited with participation in class discussions when you aren’t there.</p>
<p>I’m not in college yet, but my brother’s school seems to only take attendance in small classes and ones in which you could probably get a decent grade in without coming to class too often.</p>
<p>My CC didn’t, the school I transferred to first did, but the school I’m at now doesn’t.
The first four year school used sign in sheets, roll call and clickers all of which were equally annoying. If you missed more then three classes, you were docked a third of your grade for every additional absence regardless of why. You could be kidnapped by a thousand carrier pigeons and it didn’t matter. I hated it. It wasted time and we are adults. Don’t treat us like children.</p>
<p>(But I do understand docking grades for lab absences without giving some sort of notice. You can’t get data or do the experiment if you don’t show up.)</p>
<p>Yep. I’ve only had one class that didn’t formally take attendance and dock points after the third absence, and even the one class that didn’t take attendance still had a participation grade that accomplished the same thing.</p>
<p>I’d say maybe a third of mine so far have, and the smaller the class the more likely it is they’ll take attendance. It is SUPER annoying though, I prefer to learn things on my own versus go to a useless class so a lot of times attendance is my main weakness. Lame, I know, but still…</p>
<p>I’m not in college but it sort of makes sense to take attendance to me. If you don’t go to any of the lectures you can still pass the class and even do well but you could just be learning enough to do well on the test and homework, which could be a problem if you didn’t learn something that is a part of a later class or your job. It just seems like attending lectures would prepare you better and make your life earlier</p>
<p>Taking attendance was one of my pet peeves while in college. So, here i am paying to go to school and they are going to penalize me for not going to class?? That never ever made sense. But the fact is that some schools and some teachers will do that.</p>
<p>I definitely don’t agree with it at all but i do have to say that it is important to go to class. You never know what you might miss. That is just a fact of life, no matter how boring and redundant the info is, you need to go.</p>
<p>There were classes that i actually fell asleep in because they were so boring. Maybe that is not a shock to some people, but i did not fall asleep easily, especially sitting up and taking notes. I would look at my notes later, and laugh like crazy because the letters would get smaller and smaller until it was just a line of scribble, i guess when i nodded off.</p>
<p>So, it is not cool, in my opinion, that they take roll and count it against you. One thing to note though is that if you go to class regularly, the teacher will be much more willing to help you out as opposed to someone that is never there.</p>
<p>My classes have ranged from no attendance no credit no exceptions to the professor explicitly telling us he’s fine with us only showing up for the exams. In between those two extremes are the professors who don’t directly require attendance, but who still notice who does and doesn’t attend and remember that information when end-of-the-semester begging starts.</p>
<p>Technically at the university level there is a policy that students who miss more than 10% of the classes automatically fail, but I’ve never heard of a professor actually enforcing that.</p>
<p>One of my labs last semester, my grade was based purely on attendance. If we went to all the labs we got an A, missed one B, missed two C, …</p>
<p>We didn’t even really need to do the labs, because the TAs pretty did all of them for us. All we needed to do was download their matlab code, run it, and show it to them.</p>
<p>Depends on the class.</p>
<p>Three of my four classes this semester take attendance. One of my classes with about 100 students uses a sign in sheet but doesn’t have any specifics about how many classes you can miss. My other two classes have a policy that if you miss 8 classes you either get dropped from the class, or if it’s too late to drop, you get a F in the class.</p>
<p>Only in discussions or labs, but otherwise, lectures were not mandatory. </p>
<p>In community college where class sizes were smaller, my professors did take attendance, though.</p>
<p>Most classes at my school take attendance. Even the large 400 person science classes do.</p>
<p>My friend’s bio and chem classes would mark you down a letter grade if you missed more than three classes.</p>
<p>All of my classes had participation as part of them. One class was as high as 20%. Ugh.</p>
<p>Participation points are like a grade booster. Not sure why anyone would complain about them, you get points for doing what you’re suppose to.</p>
<p>Some of the best professors don’t require attendance…but their lectures do not just regurgitate the reading, but instead cover material not in the reading. The exams then include questions that cover lecture material, or require comparisons of examples from the reading and the lectures. So you are screwed if you miss the classes.</p>