<p>Do people often skip classes at college?
Do some people skip classes occasionally?
For what reasons?</p>
<p>Yes.
Yes.
They know nothing is going on in that class, they oversleep, they have schoolwork they need to do, a test in the next class, vacation, they simply don’t feel like going, and a multitude of other reasons</p>
<p>So it’s common for most students to skip a few classes for whatever reasons?
And they’re not looked down upon or penalized?</p>
<p>Yes, it’s common. At community college and UT anyways. People mostly skip the really huge 400 student classes. They avoid the ones where attendance is counted, but that still won’t stop everybody.</p>
<p>I look down upon my little sister who’s doing dual credit whenever she skips because I know she needs all the instruction she can get. If you absolutely need to skip, then it’s fine. But don’t make it a habit.</p>
<p>Almost everyone skips class to various degrees for various reasons. No one looks down on them. It’s not high school anymore, you’re responsible for your own education, no one’s going to hold your hand.</p>
<p>It’s common to skip a few classes. Most courses (the ones I have taken, anyway) don’t take attendance. That is not to say that the professor will not notice if you are there, especially in small classes. You can skip that 200-student lecture all you want, but you might want to go to your 4-student seminar.</p>
<p>It’s common (at least at my school which is 50% commuter) but you really shouldn’t do it. I’ve had intro classes with 200 students where maybe 30 kids would come regularly. Professors wise up when a lot of the students don’t show. My profs offered extra credit, took attendance (to be counted towards your grade) or gave pop quizzes when nobody showed up.</p>
<p>I’m a commuter and the parking absolutely SUCKS at my school so I skipped a lot of classes my first semester. It was a really bad decision. From my second semester, I’ve found that when you go to every class, the professor will notice and will be more willing to help you. Just reading the lecture notes or textbooks doesn’t work - during lecture the professor is telling you exactly what information he/she thinks is important. Take a day off if you feel sick, but try to stay organized enough so that you don’t need to miss class in order to catch up on work or study.</p>
<p>I would discourage you from skipping class unless you are truly sick. Your parents are paying you a lot of money to show up at class. It’s not that hard to show up.</p>
<p>I don’t reccomend skipping. I know exactly how many classes I missed (three when I slept in accidentally, two for my grandfather’s funeral, one for emergency health center visit) and none of them were without a legit reason. I’m kind of anal about going to class. My friend has a really bad habit with skipping classes, to the point where she ended up on probation last spring. I wish I could say she learned her lesson, but I’m taking Intro to Psych with her next semester so she’ll go to class - she has to retake it because she failed the first time around. </p>
<p>Moral of the story - go to class.</p>
<p>The only time i skip is when i’m too sick to go. I missed a week last fall due to a certain swine flu, then two days during the spring semester due to a very bad headcold. I always inform my professors ahead of time with an email and they sometimes tell me what we did in class or whats going on next time. If not i can ask other classmates :P</p>
<p>I had a physics professor who explicitly proclaimed that attendance is not necessary. However, the funny thing is that most of the kids do show up for class, as he is known to be an infamously difficult professor.</p>
<p>But yeah, if you do better self studying, don’t show up for class.</p>
<p>Yes, people skip. Yes, some people do it often. No, you shouldn’t make a habit of it. </p>
<p>If attendance isn’t taken (although some classes do. One of my classes took attendance for extra credit, which I liked) it might be really easy to skip one day, then another, and another, and soon you’ve missed 25% of the class. That’s a lot of material you missed, and you aren’t likely to make it up as well as studying on your own. I hate skipping class, because it’s so hard to catch up, and some people fall into that pattern really easily. </p>
<p>Like said, don’t do it unless you’re sick or it is otherwise necessary (I don’t advise it, but I’ve skipped class before to work on a paper for another class, but that was my own fault). I don’t doubt that if you skip and skip often, you’ll see your grades suffer. </p>
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<p>What? Some people’s parents aren’t paying anything, yanno. Yeah, I’m nit picking, but still. Some people foot the bill themselves. :P</p>
<p>At any rate, someone is paying a lot of money for you to be there, be it you or your parents or whatever, and to me, that makes it worth going to. I too don’t see the point in paying so much money to just not show up.</p>
<p>The aspect of your learning that you have the most control over is showing up for class. It’s so easy but so hard at the same time once you’ve fallen into the pattern of missing lectures.</p>
<p>It’s very, very, very common. I’d sometimes go into 300 person lectures to see less than 50 people in there. Even my 20 person classes dropped to be 5 of us in attendance. Even as a pretty good student who cares very much about my grades, I’ve ditched class because I didn’t think it would be worthwhile to go. If a professor outlines exactly what we’ll be doing [especially in English classes where we’ll get a day to simply write an essay when I could do better in my own environment], I may skip if I have a more pressing assignment to do.</p>
<p>It’s all about priorities. And even going to class doesn’t mean that everyone there is paying attention–I was physically present at 98% of my physics classes last semester, but I was mentally checked out from a large majority of them, because the professor was horrible at explaining things (either way I was going to be self-teaching the class), but we got extra credit for clicker questions so I’d just press a random button when the time came.</p>
<p>It’s up to your personal discretion really, and do it on a class by class basis.</p>
<p>Last semester for example, I had a class that had a lecture and two discussion sections a week. Your grade was a hundred percent based on discussion. There was no final. (Just a final project done in discussion) There were no tests. The lecture was taught by a borderline verbally abusive professor and was two hours earlier than any of my other classes, and more than three-quarters of a mile from my dorm. I went twice. I got a B+ in the class, completely because my discussion TA got mad when I defended my friend who he made cry in the middle of class, and therefore said I didn’t participate productively.</p>
<p>There are a ton of college students who “skip”, but I don’t allow myself to. I drag my ass up every day for my 8:30am classes, and as a result of attending all but two lectures (sickness and testing out of a class), I now have a 3.96. Skipping is NOT the way to go, and I recommend everyone go to their lectures/recitations, etc.</p>
<p>You may notice a drop in attendance when it is raining or gorgeous outside. Average days have higher attendance.</p>
<p>I have had classes where the professor very clearly based his lecture off the reading he had just assigned, and in that case I don’t go to the lecture. I just go to the accompanying discussions and do the reading. I also had a class once where the professor did nothing but read a powerpoint during lecture, which she then posted online, so I didn’t go to that either and just read the powerpoints and went to discussion. If I’d had limitless time I’d have gone to those classes anyway, I think, but there already weren’t enough hours in the day for everything I was doing so I wasn’t about to waste hours upon hours listening to someone read to me when I had other things that needed my attention.</p>
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Interesting. When that happens in my classes, I usually go to class and skip the reading.</p>