See, I’m the opposite of a class-skipper:
For classes with textbooks, I’d attend every single lecture and pester the professor with all sorts of questions, asking for elaborations on theories and examples of principles in action.
But I’d often skip the textbook reading for the class, and once I never cracked the textbook all quarter. I still did great in the class, since I learn much better from conversation than from textbook.
When our texts were real books, however scholarly, I’d actually read them, and take notees, and prepare conversation topics for seminar. But textbooks turn my eyes to glass.
I’m the same as Daniel. I attend every class, take complete notes, listen attentively to the lectures, sometimes even record them, but I never even open my textbooks.
The English language department (as well as the other language departments) all have the same rule. Each student is allowed 4 unexcused absents. After that, their grade gets reduced. Other profs are more lax, but that doesn’t matter to me since I’m an English major.
But the classes here are very small. I think my largest class has 20 students. My smallest has 8. So, if you don’t make it to class, the prof really notices.
I adjust my class-going habits based upon the class. For instance, I know that I can’t miss my CC classes unless I have to (meaning too ill to attend, not, I want to hang out with Jim/want to sleep/want to catch morning cartoons). For comparative politics, we could only miss two days out of the semester. I only missed one, and that was at the end of the year when we were going to be watching a documentary which I had already seen. For statistics, on the other hand, I know that my attending class will make exactly ZERO impact on my grade. The teacher puts me to sleep, and I know a fair amount of the information. I should’ve gone, in retrospect…but I always did the work, attended all the quizzes and tests, etc.
It bothers me when teachers have strict attendence policies and then proceed to make NO effort to be interesting. In my Spanish class last semester, we weren’t supposed to miss ANY days, and all she did was read out of the book. Which I could’ve done on my own. But I went because–and this is important–because it was expected of me as part of the class.
My class skipping all depended on the class. I used to do an informal analysis on deciding whether to attend a class or not. I had one prof who was so bad that I couldn’t stay in lecture. This was also a class of 200 and he had no idea who I was. When some unknown genius told him that they were having trouble following the lecture and copying the transperencies that he read aloud as lecture, he started posting the notes on the internet. I pretty much never attended again.
I would go to the smaller recitation groups which is where we had our exams since they were only groups of 20.
Revedge, here’s an idea – if you don’t want the students to act as if they are in high school, mayhaps the classes shouldn’t be at a high school level.
For god’s sake, professors have been handing out A’s like they were penny candy for the past two decades, and they are shocked that students don’t attend class?!! I thought professors were supposed to be the smart ones in the world.
Scenario A - I can go to each class, very often to be bored to tears, and get an A.
Scenario B - I can blow off class, spend 1/4 of the time I otherwise would have spent on the course by simply reading the books, and spend the rest of the time drinking and playing PlayStation 2, and get a B+, or possibly still even an A.
Which scenario would a smart student follow?
This ain’t a new phenomenom. I quickly stopped going to class - except for the ones that interested me - when I discovered I didn’t have to go to maintain a B+ average. And that was 16 years ago. I strongly feel I was cheated in me education. And don’t tell me that I cheated myself; my GPA demonstrated that I learned what the classes taught. They just didn’t teach enough.
You professors have no one to blame but yourselves for the culture of students blowing off classes.
I skipped quite a bit, and paid for it. Looking back I wasn’t at all ready for the freedom of college. Going to a strict parochial school for high school didn’t prepare me for the freedom of college. Knowing that I could leave when I wanted or not even go and the professor didn’t bat an eyelash was all it took.
Going to a commuter school didn’t help either. Had to drive for 30 minutes, park in a shitty spot, walk 10 minutes in freezing weather, just to listen to a few lectures. The motivation wasn’t there. It just piled on. Sure one day was fine, but then that turned into 2, then 3…
I wanted to skip a few years after high school, find a grunt job that paid decent, save some money, then go to school when I was ready but the folks told me I’d never go back.
This might be a little OT, but to the students who decide to attend class-- if you’re going to take the effort to show up, try staying awake for the majority of the class! A certain student who goes to my Physics class has, I’m not exaggerating, slept through every single class he’s attended. Why he even shows up is beyond me… it’s a 9 a.m. class, and there aren’t any classes taught at my school that begin earlier than that, so it’s not like he had a class beforehand and showed up just because he was stuck there for the day. It’s not only rude that he sleeps in the first place, but he snores, and he leaves his cell phone on so that whenever it starts ringing, he’ll be sleeping and thus unable to turn it off or answer it. If I knew that I couldn’t control my falling asleep in early day classes, I’d either drop the class, or just skip it and get the notes from a friend and get the extra two hours of sleep in my own bed.
If I were you, I’d change this. It’s way, way too lenient, and a hard, hard lesson I’ve learned is that students assume that if you’ll give an inch, you’ll give a yard. It sends amessage that it isn’t accedently crucial that you make the test the first time, you can take it whenever you next go to class. Try something like this:
You don’t actually have to make up a new exam, if that’s worrying you. Just the threat should be enough, and if they mention it afterwords, you can say “Well, I knew in your case you were sincere, and wouldn’t cheat.”
You may not have less absentiesm after this, but you will have fewer students nagging you the week before finals.
I’m also one who sometimes falls asleep during class. I’m not proud of the fact, and it’s usually from boredom more than fatigue (though fatigue plays a factor, too). I guess I’m a professor’s worst nightmare.
I don’t understand the complaints that the teacher doesn’t make the class interesting. Why does the prof have the responsibility to make the class interesting for you? It’s his/her responsibility to impart the knowledge, isn’t it?
I, like several others, must confess to being a compulsive class-attender. When I skip, it’s usually because there’s a big project at work. Boy, does that make you feel old and uber-responsible: “I’m skipping class…so I can work late.” Fortunately, my profs have been very sympathetic.
Another point about my compulsive class-attendence (great phrase!):
I go to a small-ish private university, there’s about 7-8000 students. The largest classes they offer have a total of 40 students (and that’s considered huge). Freshman and sophomore year, the average class size is 20 (most of those classes are requirements for everyone). After that it drops to an average of 7 - 11 people. It’s most definitely noticeable if someone is absent, especially if they are habitually missing.
Plus (and this is one of the things I love about this university), I am known at that university as ME, I’m not my student number. Hell, profs I had first semester freshman year remember that i’m zweisamkeit and how I did in their class and ask how I’m doing. I’m known by the heads of two departments and the dean of the college I’m in (and the former president of the university, woohoo!).
Many profs are incredibly personable (others are jackasses, but I’m ignoring those :D), and even if I hate the class, I’ll go because the prof is great. And (at least here), the profs lose respect for students who never come to class (that’s why they’re there, after all). I look up to many of these profs, and I would hate the idea of losing respect in their eyes because I didn’t feel like going to class that day.
Honestly, I can’t imagine being in a class that has 200+ students. It just doesn’t happen here. But if I did have a class that size, I can see where the temptation to skip would be greater.
Generally, I tend to skip the first class of the day, but I try to miss only one hour a week of a particular course (1hr lectures, 3 times a week) if I have to skip at all. Otherwise its just to easy to stay in bed all week! I commute (45 mins) so if I’m really tired and I feel that the drive wouldn’t go too well, then I’m likely to skip a class too. Otherwise, its only when I’m sick or when traffic or weather make me too late to make it worthwhile to go. And I always make efforts to get the notes off of others.
I have only missed one assignment ever, and it was an essay this past semester. I went to the prof the day it was due, and I really had to beg for him to let me make it up, because (and this sounds like such a fake excuse) I honestly didn’t know it had been assigned. It was handed out on the same day our midterms were returned, but that happened to be a big snowstorm day, and I wasn’t able to make it (it took me 2 hours to drive to Guelph - and I only had one other class that day to go to!). So I went to the prof, and asked about the midterm, telling him that I’d get the notes off a classmate, and he returned the exam, but at the time didn’t mention the assignment (he later told me that he thought I’d get that from my classmate as well). When I spoke to the classmate, I got the notes, and the assignment just didn’t get mentionned. I knew the assignment was going to be handed out EVENTUALLY, but since the prof cancelled the next 2 lectures because he had a conference to go to, and it was due the third lecture after, I just never heard about it, and thought it would be assigned when he came back. Imagine my surprise when he asked for the papers to be handed in! He ended up giving me the weekend, although I finished it before then and submitted it as soon as I could. Sometimes people do actually miss assignments for silly reasons like that - it happened to me. Although I’m going to make sure it NEVER happens again! It was worth 10% of my grade!
Depends on why the class isn’t interesting. If it’s not interesting because the student has no interest in the subject, of course that’s not the professsor’s responsibility.If it’s not interesting because everything the professor covers was in the last reading assignment or even worse, the professor simply reads out of the textbook, then the professor, at least in my case, didn’t impart any knowledge. I acquired the knowledge from reading the book. Maybe I was spoiled. See, in most of my high school and college classes the reading assignments were a necessary background to what was taught in class- you’d never be able to pass just by reading the text.
I don’t know if I can agree with that in every case. I mean most schools I know of have “requirements”. As far as I’m concerned if the only reason half the students are in the class at all is because someone decided “you weren’t educated unless you took x”, then somebody should at least try to make the class a little more interesting than “normal”.(I admit students bear some responsibility for picking a school where they won’t despise the requirements, as hard as that may be sometime. Still, this is their chance to make a good impression on someone that would have previously not cared about what you studied. Seems stupid to blow that chance.)
Whether I skipped depended on the class. For example, I rarely skipped any classes all through law school, but this past semester I skipped Family Law like it was goin’ out of style. Here’s the thing: the class was at 8:30 AM, so it was easy to sleep through. The professor would only lecture (he never called on anyone), he didn’t care if you showed up or not (no attendance taken), all the material you really needed to know was in the statute book, and the final was open-book, open-note. I still showed up about half the time, and I still think I learned the material. I don’t know why everyone was struggling so with the final exam.
When I was an undergrad, I took two classes in the philosophy department with the same professor, the one who taught the “history” classes (the classes I took were Classical Greek Phil. and Early Modern European Phil.). His teaching style was…lacking. Basically, he would stand in front of us and think out loud for an hour. I skipped for a month once, came back to class because I figured I should, and absolutely nothing had happened. We were still on the same subject as we were the day I’d left. Still pulled a B in both classes.
