I’ve just started the second quarter of a year-long sequence in Numerical Analysis. The grade is based solely on homework, a couple of programming projects, and the final exam, which is take-home. The professor posts all assignments on his web site, and they can be turned in to his office.
I found early on last quarter that there isn’t much benefit to attending this class. The professor simply regurgitates what’s in the textbook, right down to the examples he uses. After about the fourth week, I only showed up once a week, and even then didn’t bother to take notes - not much point, when I can get what I need from the book. I got an A.
So I’m thinking this quarter, I could conceivably complete the entire course without ever setting foot in the classroom. I live ten miles away from the university, and this class is the only one I have on Monday-Wednesday-Friday mornings - it seems pointless to drive all that way for a 50 minute class that doesn’t do anything for me.
But the thought of never showing up makes me feel kind of guilty, like I’d be offending the professor. So here’s my question to the professors out there - how do you feel about students who do this? Do you care? Do you even notice? The class size is 20 or 25 students, if that makes a difference.
I used to be a college professor. I did notice when students weren’t there if it happened often enough, but I didn’t lecture from the book and most, if not all, classes had a significant participation element. I find it hard to imagine that a professor who structured his class that way would even notice if you weren’t there. The only risk is that the same thing will occur to everyone else and he’ll end up lecturing to the back windows one morning. OTOH, maybe that’s what he wants.
If there honestly is no attendance taken and no class participation element, I’d certainly be tempted not to go.
I’d clear it with the professor first. My freshman year I took two classes in subjects both the professors and I knew I was already entirely competent but which I hadn’t taken the AP test for. The trig professor told me I could just show up for the first next three exams (I’d already taken one, and he let students drop the lowest test grade) and take an A that way. The BritLit professor let me write a couple of papers (which I knocked out over a weekend) and otherwise I only had to participate in class if someone needed a partner for a presentation. But they’d both have been irritated if I’d taken it upon myself to decide unilaterally what to do.
At the VERY least I would discuss attendance with him.
Let him know that you are driving a good distance JUST for that class. Let him know you are actually INTERESTED in the course and want to learn the material.
Explain to us what you posted, though make it a bit more flattering
And probably go in at least once a week to get a little face time, check on recent class discussions, and touch base with other students as to whats been going on.
In theory its all about the tests, but as a long time student it really burned MY ass when students dissed the teachers with various odd behaviours. As a teacher, I suspect I’d like it even less.
You never know when being on his good side might pay off with a good letter of recommendation or a job/intern offer, or just make the difference if you have personal problems he can help with class wise or you just have a borderline grade and…
Never cared a bit about attendance myself. OTOH, coming in late during the lecture and such drives most profs crazy.
I deliberately avoided book regurgitation. So I always gave different examples, alternate views, etc. So there was some risk a student skipping a lecture would miss something quite vital.
Note that when a student was having problems, missing lectures was almost a key aspect of the issue and was something To Be Discussed with them when they sought help. I.e., if they didn’t care enough to show up, I didn’t care enough to put in extra work to get them out of the hole they got themselves into.
(When the shoe was on the other foot, I almost always attended every lecture because what else was I going to do? I needed a way to kill time.)
Well, I’m not a professor, but as an undergrad, I would have looked at the course catalog to see if the professor taught any upper level courses in my department. If he didn’t, I wouldn’t have thought twice about skipping.
I’m not a professor, but I was a TA for a few years. I never cared whether my students came to class. Of course, it was a different situation than what you describe, insofar as the tests were administered in class, so no attendance would have resulted in a certain fail.
I could see the prof getting peeved if you ask for help outside of class hours, or if you complain because he changes a deadline without posting it on the web. Also, make sure you come to class on the first day, so he knows you are enrolled, and get get a printed copy of the sylllabus so you have proof that there is no weight given to attendance. Go for it, if you think you can hack it, just bear in mind that you are on your own if you don’t understand something in the text.
Just a TA, but my impression is what really gets math and science instructors is students who skip lectures but then show up in office hours expecting their own private tutorial. That’s guaranteed to piss them off. But if someone never shows up but still gets great grades then many instructors are happy to just leave them alone. “A” students who don’t bicker over grades and directions are very low maintenance.
IME the professors who are picky about attendance also spend a lot of time planning out the lectures and examples. The ones who use the book outline or the last instructor’s notes tend to think that just reading the book or the notes is a perfectly fine way to learn a subject.
Check your school’s and department’s policies. In my department, professors are required to take attendance and to fail any student who misses more than 25% of the classes, regardless of how the student performs on the papers and exams. After the first week or two, it is not necessarily obvious to my students that I am taking attendance – our classes are all under 30 students, so a glance around the room usually suffices.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of this policy, except in writing classes where peer critique is a major component of the course. IMO, college students are adults and it’s their own damn business whether they come to class, and the ones who miss a bunch of classes are guaranteed an F for participation and generally shoot themselves in the foot in other ways as well; I’m a big believer in natural consequences. However, I’m at a small university where the enrollment numbers are a big, big deal, and the administration pretty much bends over backward to hold students’ hands and keep them from flunking themselves out.
No, I’m not personally offended by non-attendance, but I do get annoyed when a student has been absent for most of the semester and then decides to rip me to shreds on the course evaluations. If you weren’t part of the class in any meaningful way, you don’t get to have an opinion about it.
It sounds like the professor is setting up the class so that attendance isn’t required. As has been mentioned, anything that comes up in class that doesn’t show up on the website is not good for you, but you definitely have the option of not attending.
I should have clarified - this is an upper division class. In fact, it’s actually a graduate level course. This is my final quarter, in March I’ll earn my degree in Math. I have no interest in continuing on with Math, though; next up I’ll be pursuing a second degree in Computer Science.
Yeah, I went on Monday, just to make sure nothing has changed this quarter. It hasn’t. I’ve never been then type to go to professors for help; on the rare instances I need it, I can usually find it elsewhere (online in recent years). In the case of this class, the textbook is just fine.
I don’t think this guy would be able to figure out who I am even if he misses me. We’ve never spoken in person, he’s never taken roll. Last quarter I emailed him once, just to get clarification on the format of a programming project.
I used to use attendance as a grading criteria, and most of my colleagues (I’m an adjunct, hoping to become tenured one of these years) still do. Most of them also make big fucking deals out of cell phones, late arrivals, etc. Here’s why I don’t:
This is college, for chrissake. You’re paying for it. Either you get your money’s worth or you don’t. If you attend the lectures, do the homework and write the papers well, you’ll get a goodl grade. If you don’t, you won’t. If you want to piss away $200 a credit hour by texting your BFFs during my class, you’re welcome to it – I get paid no matter what your grade is, and whether your butt’s in the chair or not.
Here’s the really nice thing about teaching at the college level: It’s just between me and the student. If they meet my expectations, they’ll make themselves happy. If they don’t, they wont. I don’t have to deal with parents (in fact, I absolutely refuse to) and I don’t have a bunch of rules.
As a writing instructor, I don’t care if people show up or not, and I only take attendance because it’s required of me. The way I figure it, it’s none of my business if a student wants to fail. I won’t have an F following me around on my transcripts, after all. And I do get paid either way. But any student who misses a great deal of my classes will fail. I suppose it’s possible for a student to be such an amazing writer that Writing 2020 is totally redundant for them–but I’ve never had one of them on my role sheet. I mean, the way I see it, if I spend an entire class period lecturing on revising passive sentences (or run on sentences or just plain bad, clunky sentences), and I get a paper from somebody who is chronically absent that is full of passive constructions and run-on sentences, they’re pretty much going to get what they deserve.
Yeah, what you said. I’m guessing you get consistently high student evaluations and a large number of students telling you yours is the first writing class they’ve ever really enjoyed. But that’s just a guess. (Uh, is there supposed to be a apostrophe in “yours”?)
No, no apostrophe in “yours”. And yeah, I do get pretty high evaluations and form good relationships with my students. I’ve even had a few that did fail my class, but actually took responsibility for what they did wrong and accepted that I would have passed them if they had fulfilled their obligations–judging from stories from my colleagues, that’s somewhat rare.
Not a prof, but I taught intro-level classes for about two years after I graduated. The weren’t quite like upper-division courses, but the class size was smaller than the OP’s and I did notice when someone wasn’t there.
It miffed me slightly when people didn’t show up, since, hey, I had to wake my ass up and commute too, but it didn’t really hurt my feelings or make me angry or anything. If you didn’t care about your performance, I wasn’t going to do it for you.
I don’t want to sound preachy and I won’t pretend I never cut any classes. Hell, one of my recurring nightmares is I skipped my microbiology lecture yet again and it’s finals day and I’ll flunk out of college. But I do think that the attitude of “it’s too far and it’s not worth it, so I won’t go” is a poor one. At best, this will reflect poorly on you with the professor and you run the miniscule chance of missing something that will be mentioned in class but not in the book. At worst, this is the start of a chain of poor practices that extend beyond your education years and into your other aspects of your life. And for what? A few bucks in gas? 7 free hours a week? Unless you’re using that time to work or study or feed starving orphans, I don’t think it’s worth it.
Besides, you never know where your profs will rematerialize in your life. I had a prof my first semester of school, and then years later wound up taking several upper-division courses from him and worked as his research assistant for a year.
My commute was about 40 miles roundtrip by public transportation, so the “20 miles by car” doesn’t impress me.
It’s funny you should have asked this, because just today I read an article on distance education in UCLA’s *Daily Bruin**. According to this, it’s not uncommon for a professor to put up a course website, but stipulate that these online resources are not meant to replace the class. A few go so far as to hint that they might pull the websites if in-person attendance suffers too noticeably over the long run. In other words, they want you to be in class. It should be noted, that UCLA generally, along with the rest of the UC system, is notoriously conservative about online degree programs, or indeed any type of non-traditionally scheduled degree programs. This can be extremely frustrating to those who are older and have entered into the obligations of full-time work or family life.
*For those inclined to look for it, I read it today, but it appeared earlier this week.
On a side note, as a student, I have had 4 professors in three semesters that gave extra credit for showing up to lectures. They all waited about 5 or 6 weeks into the term, usually on a day when attendance was very low, then passed around a “sign in sheet.” They did this randomly, and usually on days before holidays or major sporting events. It often wasn’t clear that this was for extra credit until the end of the semester.
The only lecture that I frequently skipped was an “Intro to Architecture” class, taught by a boring, monotone professor. The three tests were all “take home, fill in the blank” types, with every question taken verbatim from his notes, which he posted online. And we could turn them in by email. The Lab for the class was completely unrelated to the lectures, and much more enjoyable: I never missed one.
As a grad student, I taught a bunch of labs. They had to show up, obviously, to complete the lab. But if it had been just a lecture class, I wouldn’t have cared if they showed up. If you can learn the material on your own well enough to complete the homework assignments and pass the tests, then hey, good for you.
Also, Sunrazor’s response in post #12 is right on. “This is college, for chrissake.” Time for the students to be adults and decide for themselves just how much they want to get out of their college experience.
What I taught was a lab, so attendance was definitely required.
My undergrad school had attendance requirements but the one teacher who taught completely from notes he’d given us on the first day, who never changed a comma and who then tested us not even on the notes but on the book was amazed and happy when someone suggested that, instead of coming and playing cards in class, maybe he could give the card players an attendance waiver and let them move to the cafeteria :smack: (chess too, and parcheesi…)
And yeah, I do get pretty high evaluations and form good relationships with my students. I’ve even had a few that did fail my class, but actually took responsibility for what they did wrong and accepted that I would have passed them if they had fulfilled their obligations–judging from stories from my colleagues, that’s somewhat rare.