<p>Where I go to community college, on the first day of classes, my professors usually takes attendance to see if the people enrolled have showed up. If someone on the roster doesn't show up, that student is dropped from the course and a seat is cleared for another student who is on the waitlist or is petitioning to get into the class. In classes where there are over 45 students, it takes the professor a while to get through the entire roster and check to see if everyone's there. After the first day, unless attendance counts as part of your grade, they don't take attendance anymore.</p>
<p>Which leads me to wonder, at universities where some lecture halls have about 200+ students in it, how long does it take professors to take attendance on the first day of classes?</p>
<p>At my school, they don’t. I would be surprised to hear if they did anywhere with a class that size. I know of a lot of people who don’t bother going to the first day, since most of the lecture consists of material covered in the syllabus.</p>
<p>It tends to go pretty quickly now that there’s a feature for it on the professor’s part of Blackboard. It lists all of the students with their ID picture and a check mark for here and an x for not here. They usually put it up on the screen so that everyone can see it so that they can make corrections if the professor misses their name or something. Maybe 15 minutes.</p>
<p>My school does not generally do that on a first day, since the first week of classes is add/drop and people typically are switching their schedules around and dropping in and out of classes the whole week. Some professors do take attendance just to get a feel for the class, but that’s generally only for small classes.</p>
<p>For big lectures, I’ve had professors pass around a paper with the students names on it to sign next to. In my big engineering lectures at my old school, instead we had iClickers and we had to click in at the beginning of the class (which led to the problem of people clicking in for themselves and four of their friends). So these have both been pretty quick and just occurring as the class goes on. I know that next year I’m TAing for intro to psych and the professor takes attendance by assigning seats, giving us the seating chart and having us mark whether or not it is occupied. Then, we take photographs of each half of the lecture hall so that if there’s a dispute, we can check the photographs. </p>
<p>Ultimately, I’ve never been in a big class that wastes the kind of time to call roll on the first day or any other day of class.</p>
<p>I’ve heard most colleges don’t take attendance, especially in most large universities. At smaller ones, I don’t even know if they necessarily take attendance. Although, if the class is very small, professors may notice who shows up and who doesn’t, whether they actually record that down or not.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed “No-show-drop” being used a lot more at my school as the administration has increased enrollment by 10% without adding more class sections or teachers.</p>