I was a TA for a few years. It’s pretty easy to tell which students are skipping class because they just don’t give a shit. Those never bothered me, and I never had to apply any penalty beyond giving them poor grades based on their poor knowledge of the material.
But if a student who was obviously taking the material seriously stopped coming to class, I would question whether the problem was with me, the teacher. I’m being paid to provide instruction over and above what can be gained from just reading the book and doing the assigned problems. I certainly had professors who wouldn’t have cared if the whole class stayed in bed, but professors like that ought to consider a different line of work IMO.
I adjunct a once-a-week composition class at a small college. Do I take attendance? Yes - I must; I’m required to submit the number of absences per semester for every student. Even if I don’t ding them for non-attendance, the registrar reserves that right.
Would I, were it not required? Nope. I prefer natural consequences. If you don’t show up, you may miss hearing about next week’s assignment. Oops. You’ll certainly make a good deal of work for yourself when you need to make up, within a week’s time, the in-class work you missed (or fail for that assignment).
I was, though, irritated when a student e-mailed me after I had submitted my final grades to say that, well, he’s on a sports scholarship and needs to maintain a certain G.P.A., so is there any way he can do extra credit to boost his grade?
I e-mailed him back to politely inform him that he’d had a running opportunity for 75% of the semester to do extra credit, but that ship had sailed. Good luck with the scholarship, and I wish you well.
And then I ripped out a small clump of hair.
I didn’t go to many classes in university (college to you yanks). However, I had a good support group of fellow students and we all made sure we didn’t miss anything important.
There were many classes where the professor did not speak english very well. I was better off stuggling through it on my own or bribing upper-years with meals for assistance (and being sure to pay it forward when I was an upper-year).
Aside: if the prof was a good teacher who I could learn from, I would go to class religiously. Unfortunately, these were few and far between.
I attend my lectures even though I could easily get the notes from the internet, or read from the text book, i simply find i learn better by listening to a lecture than by reading the text book.