As a student, I wouldn’t think twice about skipping a class if I knew my time could be better spent at home. I’ve had some bad lecturers in the past, and some really horrible workloads, so my focus was on how to pass the course without going mad rather than whether I was hurting their feelings by not showing up.
My experience was also that virtually every teacher I had WAS worth going to listen to.
Out of all my teachers, only a couple were so bad it was common to not get anything from the lecture, and even then once in a great while you got something.
Also, IMO, most students who think they don’t get anything from the prof aren’t nearly as smart and educated as they THINK they are.
Maybe these type of students should like take harder classes or go to a better school or sumptin?
If you don’t want to attend, go for it, and I don’t think anyone should FORCE you.
But, if you wanna shoot yourself in the foot so to speak, have fun.
My round trip commute to school was 110 miles (Yes, it sucked. Yes, it was still a better option to commute than move down there).
I had some professors whose classes were regurgitation of the book and were not worth attending. I hated those classes, and I rarely went to them.
My favorite classes by far were always the professors who taught something, even better if they only used the book as a supplement and missing a day of class would severally hurt you. I always learned more from them and rarely missed a day of class, despite the drive. I wish more professors taught that way, though some of my fellow students complained about it.
I’ve been on both sides of this. As an undergrad, there were a few courses that I only showed up for the exams. One was physics. I had the textbook and I had no problem understanding it. I had taken physics in high school and this was just more of the same. So I only showed up three times–one for each exam (and the final, of course.) Easy A.
I also had a couple of psychology lectures where a TA would basically just read from the book. Total waste of my time. Although for one of these he would give pop quizzes, so I had to show up just in case. I brought the newspaper and read.
(These were in large lecture halls. I would not have sat in a class of 25 and read the paper. And I would never had skipped out on an upper-level or graduate class. A lot of what you get out of those classes stems from the interaction/discussions of the group. Plus, professors talk to each other and you wouldn’t want to get a bad rep within your program.)
Now, to address the OP: I have been adjunct faculty at a university and an instructor at a community college. The CC required me to take attendance and there were mandatory thresholds that students had to meet. However, for the university lecture calsses I didn’t take attendance and I didn’t care one whit if students showed up or not. Of course I made it very clear that I mostly taught from my notes (not the text), so one skips class at one’s own risk. I do remember one guy who only showed up for the exams, each of which he failed. I remember laughing at him as I passed out the final exam and asking him “why bother?”
I’m now in grad school for Electrical Eng.
Absolutely. Often the decision to attend class isn’t about “getting your full money’s worth”, but about resourcing my time as a student. If skipping a non-value-added lecture allowed me to spend my time on homework or study to get better grades in other classes, I absolutely would. I’ve had professors that lecture verbatim off of the textbook, and IMO it is they who are wasting the money I paid for to get a direct education from a university full of expert instructors.
I tend to now write very scathing feedbacks to professors (and their bosses) that do not give value-added lectures. As an undergrad, I always felt we were supposed to meekly take our lumps from useless verbatim lectures, not realizing that I was paying a lot of money for a service that should be provided and often wasn’t.
(edit)
…and I get especially thorny in my complaints to profs and admins when classes get delegated to TAs that don’t perform. I am not paying my money for your awkward OJT mistakes and inexpertise.
Good for you.
Those are the two the OP is asking about.
When the instructor is literally reading for the book, or from his lecture notes verbatim, it’s a pretty easy call.
Maybe you were just lucky, I went to a great school and still had a few bad apples.
Thanks for your permission.
The OP isn’t shooting himself in the foot.
As a student I went to all classes, took only sketchy notes and rarely studied (in math courses; I had to study other things). I would have been lost if I didn’t go to class.
As a professor I never took role, but I would notice if someone cut frequently. It didn’t affect their marks but it made me less likely to pay attention to their sob stories.
I basically used the text only for the purpose of seeing what the next topic was and for giving assignments. I don’t have the impression that the students found overly useful either.
I probably taught at schools that required attendance taken and had all sorts of penalties for students who were overcut, but I figured if they really cared, they could assign me an attendance taker.
At the VERY least this is one of the important considerations.
Not to mention that one day he mentions he is grading on a curve and half the final will be from the following lecture and none of your selfish SOB fellow students sure as heck dont/wont tell you that… and, well…
This touches on one of my pet peeves with the American educational system … that grading is generally non-anonymous.
At Oxford, so long as you don’t get kicked out by your college, finals are completely anonymous and count for 100% of your degree… if you can do well without showing up for stuff, that’s your call and good for you! It’s your degree!
‘Participation grades’ and non-blind grading in the US just strike me as institutionalised corruption and favouritism, and I try to avoid them as much as I can in my own classes.
pdts
20+ years as a CS prof:
I like to think that I don’t simply regurgitate the text, but I also put all my slides, lecture notes, etc., online for my students. I really don’t get upset if students don’t attend the lectures, provided that they are doing well in the assignments, tests, etc. In any class, the best students really don’t need me for much more than to provide an organization for them to follow.
What really bothers me are the students who
- come into my office a couple weeks before the end of the semester, announce that they are completely lost
2) expect me to provide them with enough extra-credit work and/or to find them a tutor to make up, in the remaining 2 weeks, for 12 weeks of floundering; and
3) I look at them and realize that I don’t recognize them because I haven’t seen them in class
4) nor have they shown up for office hours before now to ask questions about the material they didn’t understnad
5) nor have they posted any questions on the course message board all semester
6) nor have they emailed me any questions all semester.
I don’t mind if students absent themselves from my lectures, but if them absent themselves from the course as a whole, then I think they deserve their failing grade.
I’m always polite to these people while they are in my office, but they make me want to pull out my hair the moment they leave.
One factor that should be considered is the sheer physical overcrowding on some university campuses. Again with regard to UCLA, as a huge urban campus most of whose students live off campus, it is undoubtedly one of the most crowded in the country. A space in which to simply sit down and study for an hour and a half between classes can be hard to come by; library carrels are in short supply. Or they may be available, but without the outlets to support laptop use, which has become virtually essential. Not counting various graduate schools and departments that may provide lounges for their TAs and other students, dedicated study lounges are woefully inadequate to meet the needs of the thousands of undergraduates who come to campus every day. That being the case, one sees them sitting on the floors outside classrooms, perched uncomfortably in doorways and arches (the iconic arches in front of Royce Hall have ridges running along their bases that make sitting awkward). And so, who can blame some students for preferring to stay home and study, or ensconcing themselves at a nearby Starbucks to hit the books. Southern California weather is nice 90% of the time, but nobody wants to have to sit outdoors all the time to study. I do understand and appreciate the benefits of being in the classroom, but also believe it should be up to the student to address the problems that can ensue by their not being there, and to make the determination as to what works best for him/her.
I’m a prof on the tenure track teaching in a grad program. My discipline involves a lot of discussion and group oriented work, so it’s preferable that people come to class.
I have two examples of students who had sketchy attendance records. One was a full-time administrator in a local school. He rarely told me that he’d be late; rather, he’d stroll into our once-a-week class halfway through. Sometimes he would explain what happened, other times not. When he didn’t show up, no heads up - he just wasn’t there.
The second student was an administrator at the university and had considerable travel the semester she took my course. She discussed her schedule with me before she enrolled, always gave me a heads up when she was out, and was diligent in having a class buddy who shared notes, announcements, and so on.
Both, in fact, did well in my course. But one left a distinctly poor impression on me, and the other, I’d gladly write a recommendation for whenever she needs it. I agree with those that have said that it’s respectful and smart to tactfully tell the prof that you’d prefer not to make it every class. If he/she has a TA I’d ask them first.
It obviously depends on the discipline and the teacher, but I take my teaching seriously, and I work really hard to structure activities and discussions that will engage students. The sense of community in the course, and trust that the members of the learning community have with one another is compromised when someone isn’t equally as engaged as the rest of the class.
But if you’re sick, please stay at home!
I’m supposed to take attendance at every class—my university used to distribute an attendance sheet with every day for every student needing to be filled in “Present” or “Absent.” (They said it was a state-generated form and mandatory, but I ignored it from the first, and I suspect so did most professors because I haven’t seen it in over a decade.)
I do take my own attendance, tho, most of the time, for one reason: at my school (maybe all colleges these days) I always get some lazy slob asking me (usually in the last two weeks of the term) to assign him “extra credit” work or to credit him somehow with “trying hard” despite his poor grades. I point out how “extra credit” has been available all term (I often assign time-specific optional assignments, and I discuss this “extra credit” on my syllabus) but now it’s too late to earn any, and as for trying hard, well, according to my attendance sheet, you’ve been absent for 12 out of 39 classes, which is a) a fact and b) not a sign of trying very hard. It’s not foolproof, but very often the people claiming they’ve “tried hard” (which I find laughable–I really couldn’t care less if you do well due to massive effort or natural talent) also have skipped many classes. Slam dunk, case closed, no protracted discussion necessary.
I’ve learned to create different kinds of activities in the classroom to keep things varied and to let students know that they need to be there physically as much as possible.
I’ve arranged for written responses to chapters, exercises to be announced in class and done there–with or without a group; group discussions of stories or films as prep for essays on them; campus representatives coming in person to tell everyone about transferring, using the health center, tutoring, the writing lab; research orientation in the library; peer editing of drafts; etc.
I am no longer required to take roll, as this is not considered a positive attendance kind of class, but I still take it for a while to see if there is anyone who’s not coming back at all–they have to be dropped by a certain deadline, and I have forms to fill out in this regard. Also, I take roll for a while to learn people’s names.
After said deadlines have passed, people can no longer be dropped, so roll-taking goes by the wayside.
Many of us have policies allowing a certain number of absences. The college has a policy stating that those who miss a certain number of hours, before the withdrawal date, can be dropped at the prof’s discretion, so there is some degree of variation here.
As a student, I attended all of my classes religiously, except one type - in my huge (200-800 person) biology classes, the lectures were recorded and put online along with the powerpoints, and to say that the teachers wouldn’t recognize me was an understatement. I actually never attended a single lecture of one class my last semester, as it was scheduled at the same time as a class I needed for my major.
As a teacher, I do sort of care. On the one hand, I agree about college being a place for students to make their own decisions - I’m not interested in hand-holding. On the other hand, I make a whole lot of effort to provide content that’s helpful for students during the lectures/discussions, and I’m not doing it for my own edification. Not all profs will care, of course, but I admit I have less respect for students who don’t show up, and in general (although obviously there are exceptions) it correlates well with students who do poorly.
(Says the girl scheduled to teach her first completely solo, designed-by-me class this afternoon!)
So, the quarter ended last week, and I just got my grades today.
I didn’t attend this class after the first day, and never had any communication with the professor. I had no problem getting the assignments done with only my textbook, and turned everything in early.
I got an A.
congrats on the good grade, but may I ask a question?
How does your school prevent massive cheating? You could have paid somebody to do all your work and hand it in with your name on it.
(and yes, as you can tell from the question—I’m way out of touch. It’s been a couple of decades since the last time I took an exam.)*
*that is, an exam for which you got grades.Ya know, unlike prostrate exams
As a TA teaching a course, I don’t care if students don’t show up (even though I’m supposed to); I figure that they’re only shooting themselves in the foot. However, I cut people absolutely no slack if they miss an assignment, do poorly on an assignment, or beg for my help in any way.
That’s a good question - I don’t know. I do recall, during my first quarter there, a TA saying that the university’s policy is to have some percentage of the grade based on in-class exams. But that wasn’t the case here…
I’m not a teacher, but I did this with two classes as an undergrad.
The first was an American History class where the professor admitted on day one that nothing in his lectures had anything to do with the class, and he didn’t care whether we showed up or not. His tests were multiple-choice with verbiage taken straight from the the textbook; he spent his lecture hour spouting off random batshit-crazy opinions to “inspire thought and discussion”. I went to the first couple to see if he said anything interesting, but after “men can generally beat up women, discuss” and “it is impossible to do anything unselfishly because the fact that you did it means that you desired to do it”, I figured it was pretty much a waste of time.
The second was a calculus class that I had basically already taken. I took AP Calculus, roughly equivalent to Calc I and II, in high school; I got an A, but I couldn’t afford the AP exam to get college credit for the course. I talked to the professor, and he said more or less what Sunrazor said. I did show up to a couple of his classes anyway, just because he was a hell of a math prof; I wish I could’ve learned Calc from him instead of my HS teacher.
In both cases, I got an A in the class with no problems. I’d say that as long as you have a good read on the lecturing style and written proof (eg, the syllabus) that attendance isn’t graded, you’re probably fine.