Eh, my courses are supposed to require attendance but what usually happens is that the professor takes attendance the first 1-2 classes, stops thereafter, and either gives full marks for the attendance/“participation” grade at the end or possibly docks you if he or she just doesn’t like you for some reason.
My wife has been a college professor for almost a decade.
Her philosophy is “Be harsh on the syllabus, and kind in person.”
The syllabus spells out in excruciating detail exactly how the grading system works. There’s no built-in fudge factor.
However … she also understands that students have lives and sometimes those lives get complicated in unforeseen ways: deaths, accidents, sickness, whatever.
So on the syllabus she also emphasizes that if anyone has a real problem, they should come to her office and talk to her about it. And if they make a good case, she’s willing to bend the rules. This might involve delaying a submission deadline, or assigning extra credit to make up for lost work. She’s more likely to be lenient if you come in BEFORE you blow an assignment, but given a good-enough reason, she’ll make accommodations afterward too.
After a few weeks she pretty much knows who’s trying to do the work and who’s blowing things off. As long as a student is making a good faith effort, she’ll try to help them succeed. If they’re blowing the class off, the syllabus is law.
Attendance isn’t just about compliance. It’s about having you there to participate in the discussion so everybody can benefit, be there for group assignments so your group isn’t fucked over, and all sorts of other things. The whole class loses out when people don’t show up, often.
If you hate the fact you must implement a rule you don’t like, then minimize it and ensure the attendance policy does as little damage as possible.
If there are 1,000 points available in the entire class, for example, then make a rule saying a student will lose 1 raw point (of 1,000) if he or she accumulates more than X absences throughout the entire course.
Bob ends up with 924 points, adjusted to 923 with the attendance penalty.
Policy implemented? Check.
Overall effect on Bob? Diddly squat.
See post #8 above for my response to just this argument.
Just to be clear, this isn’t the issue at all. As I say in the OP, there are particular factors applicable to this particular school which make the policy make more sense than some (including myself admittedly) might have thought at first.
So, part of the beef appears to be that crappy students get rewarded a bit more than good students for attending classes (unless you implement a points system where attendance doesnt make a measureable difference ).
Isnt it the really crappy students that really NEED to be encouraged to attend in first place?
Hell, even if they don’t learn anything from actually coming, they at least learn something about bitting the bullet, doing what they don’t like, and being “responsible”. That may not be the purpose of the course, but its certainly a life lesson that even the stupid in college will benifit from once they are in the real world.
If it was me, I’d adjust the system so that attendance could JUST make a decent difference. Like say, nearly perfect attendance (maybe a freebee or two in there) vs bad attendance could bring a C+ up to a B- with all else being equal.
Of course there has to be leeway given for genuine emergencies etc.
But I try to put aside my judgments about students’ character and just look at the data, and base the grade on that.
The TA’s at my university had a debate recently about whether blind grading is a good thing. Most TA’s seemed to think that blind grading is bad, because it doesn’t allow the grader to take into account past progress, impressions of the student from class participation, interpretation of unclear comments based on past conversations, and so on. A minority argued that it is wrong to take any of these kinds of things into account, and that’s precisely why blind grading is good.
I was part of that minority.
Yes, I can. Because of this:
Look at Alice and Bob again. They both have 90% so far, due to their assignments. Now think about Alice. She comes to 9 out of 10 classes. That’s a 90% attendence rate. So now she’s:
Pre-attendance: 90%
Post-attendance: 90%
It looks like, from these numbers, that Alice didn’t gain anything at all from attending 9 classes. It looks like she should have just stayed home, right?
No, of course not. You seem to be forgetting that if you’re scoring x% at anything (whether it be an MLB batting average, a test score, playing poker, or anything) that you have to perform at x% on every subsequent trial just to maintain that score. So if Alice is at 90% for one part of her grade and you give her a 100% for the rest of her grade, it can’t move the average very much. She only outperformed by 10%. Now let’s go back to Bob.
Pre-attendance: 90%
Post-attendance: 81%
It looks like he dropped a lot of points. And by your math, you’re looking at Alice’s 10% attendance “bonus” and Bob’s 0% and saying “Hey, that’s only a 10% difference. It shouldn’t matter that much”.
But you’re looking at the wrong number. What you should see is that Alice overacheived by 10% and Bob underacheived by a whopping -90%.
10% vs. -90%. Yeah, I call it fair that Bob’s grade drops a lot and Alice’s doesn’t go up much. The same math happened after the first test, when Bob and Alice took the second test. Then again on the third test, and the fourth, and so on.
Try your math backward, counting in the attendance first. You’ll start Bob at 0% and end up with him at 81%. That’s a huge bonus for not even showing up to class! You’ll start Alice at 100% and lower her to 91% (or 90% if she shows up 9/10 like I said and not 10/10 like you said). Hey, wait a minute…Alice showed up all the time and got hurt by it?! No, it’s just math magic. I’m just moving numbers quickly in front of your face to impress/confuse you. In the end, it all checks out as planned.
Ultimately, I feel like you’re basically trying to make a rule that circumvents the policy. You hate that you have to give a grade for attendance and you’re trying to get around that. I say that if you want to be fair, you have to follow the policy and reject this strategy. Realize that there is no reason why attendance should count for the “dumb” students and not count for the brilliant students. Everyone gets the same score if they show up the same amount. Quit trying to change that and follow your policy. If you really want to circumvent your policy, just make attendance count for 0.01% of the grade and be done with it.
Can you explain to me why you think that attendance should count differently for different people? Why should one score affect the other? It seems that your policy-makers certainly don’t think it should.
Perhaps the way to deal with this is to index the weight of the attendance grade based on the normal testing grade for each student.
I don’t find it strange that Alice only gets +1 for attendance while Carl gets +4. First, her +1 is more valuable than a +1 would be for Carl, since 90->91 is more significant than 60->61. Second, likely it’s more important to encourage the lower students than the top students.
The problem I would have among the four students is Bill’s -9, as that seems to be far too much for a 90 student to lose for attendance.
So my solution is to take the maximum positive grade change under your described system, and make the negative limit the same size. A 90 student can only gain or lose a single point, but a 60 student can gain or lose 4. You would have to make this symmetric for marks below 50.
I’d make it so attendence does not affect one’s grade at all, but failure to keep attendance at or above a certain level means you will not get a grade.
For instance, say you want to ensure attendance at a 95% level, meaning a kid could miss at most 1 day every 4 weeks. If they keep attandence above 95%, then they get whatever grade they are making based on acedemic performance. If at the end of the semester attendance is below 95%, they fail, no matter what their acedemic performance is.
Does attendance have to be a specific line item on the syllabus? I’ve had quite a few college professors who simply said that you can only turn in assignments or take a quiz on the day that it’s due. In other words, if you’re absent, you don’t get to turn in the assignment that was due that day or take the quiz that was given in class. The penalty is that missing class means missing assignment/quiz points as well, and therefore attendance plays a big role in your grade.
On a side note, I once had a professor who would lower his student’s grades by one full letter grade for each day that they missed. Yikes!
Can you explain why the attendance requirement should be different for each student? Why should the lower-testing students have to perform a feat that the A students don’t?
I still don’t get this business of having grades affect attendance requirements. The two are unrelated. It’s like you’re saying that students that get As don’t have to attend class. That’s stupid and defeats the entire purpose of the policy. You aren’t special just because you get As.
If you have a D in the class and you want to get a D, then all you have to do is get a D in attendance. If you have an A, and you want to keep an A, then YES, YOU DO need to get an A in attendance. That’s the way grading works. It’s like you guys want to say “If you have an A, and you want to keep an A, then go ahead and fail attendance. We’ll still give you an A. But if you have a D and you do the same thing as the A students, then you fail.” Can’t you see the problem with that?
The thing about attendance is I feel pretty strongly its one area where their should be room for a fudge factor.
Let’s say you have two students who show good mastery over the material. Attendance is worth 5 points out of 100%. Both have final grades - without attendance - of 89 - 93.7% on the material itself - they’ve done darn good on everything thrown at them.
One has been blowing off class, not talking to you. From everything you can tell, there isn’t any reason he should be missing his five points to put him squarely in A territory without attendance other than his own laziness.
The other one came up to you shortly after the withdraw date to let you know she’s been diagnosed with cancer. She missed four out of ten classes - giving her a zero for attendance, but makes every effort to show up and pay attention when she can, keeps in you the loop, and appears frankly to be working her butt off in difficult circumstances.
Do both these students deserve losing five points of their grade and getting Bs instead of As?
Exactly. The fudge factor isn’t there to allow you to punish students you don’t like. It keeps you from locking yourself into taking points away from someone who is genuinely struggling.
Also, I would strongly suggest wording the requirement as “attendance and participation”. Otherwise, you get people showing up and making phone calls, sleeping, talking, and otherwise being disruptive. That isn’t fulfilling the intent of the requirement.
Because they failed to perform the feat that the A students did: learning the subject matter.
Basically, the students have to demonstrate that they were using a study method that works. They can do that by using the study method the teacher knows works, or they can use their own method and back it up with perfect scores.
The policy I’ve been leaning toward simply subtracts one point from the course grade for each day missed. Doesn’t this treat each student identically? Does it require lower-testing students to perform a feat that A students don’t?
You might be. If you can get an A without coming to class, then I feel you deserve the A. (Note that this is not well reflected in the policy I’m leaning towards adopting.) The course grade should reflect an assessment of mastery of the course material. Attendance has nothing to do with such an assessment.
Moreover, the policy is premised on the idea (not remembering the wording exactly here) that attendance is crucial to the learning process. If a particular student shows that attendance is not crucial to his learning process, then the assumtption is negated, and arguably the policy shouldn’t apply. (Though of course the policy-makers intend it to be applied anyway.)
But including attendance as a grade among other grades is not the only way to have attendance affect the course grade. So “that’s the way grading works” doesn’t settle the matter.
The policy I’m leaning toward doesn’t do this. But I think you’re referring to an alternative I mentioned–which in some moods I prefer–which subtracts less from the grade the higher the assignment average. The rationale for this is as follows:
Having attendance affect the course grade is meant to encourage attendance, and is a policy built on an assumption that attendance is necessary for good performance on assignments. But for some students attendance is not necessary for good performance. Moreover, for those who don’t do well on assignments, attendance is extremely likely to help them. So the worse you are performing, the more discouragement from non-attendance you will be given.
Anyway, forgetting that alternative, let’s compare the policy of including attendance as just another grade to be averaged in, and on the other hand simply subtracting points from the course grade for failure to attend.
Typically, we interpret a course grade as a measure of mastery of the course material. So suppose I am looking at a student’s grade, and it is a 90. If that grade is arrived at by simply subtracting up to ten points for non-attendance, then for all I know, that 90 reflects a mastery level anywhere from 90 to 100. If the grade is an 80, then the actual mastery leve is anywhere from 80 to 90. And so on–each possible course grade corresponds to a range that is easy to calculate on the spot.
Suppose, though, that attendance is averaged in with the other assignments, and counts for ten percent. If I’m looking at a 90, then the actual course mastery might have been anywhere from 88.88 to 100. If I’m looking at an 80, actual mastery may have been anywhere from 77.77 to 88.88. If I’m looking at a 70, the actual mastery may have been anywhere from 66.66 to 88.88.
In this latter case, not only is the range of possible actual mastery grades wider given a particular course grade, but moreover, the place of that particular course grade within that range is not so easily calculable. (It happens to be fairly easy for grades that are multiples of ten, but that’s a coincidence. The math gets harder for non-ten-multiple numbers).
It’s not just a complaint about difficult arithmetic. This is meant to illustrate the fact that a course grade with attendance averaged in is not as accurate an indicator of course mastery as would be a course grade with attendance subtracted out. The subtraction method gives you a clear rule involving a single operation that tells you the range of possible mastery levels given a particular course grade. The averaging method gives you a rule that’s clear in a sense, but which involves several more than a single operation–and gives you a wider range of possibilities besides.
So in practical terms at least, the subtraction method makes course grades a better measurement of mastery.
And as I’ve said above, it seems to me that what should be averaged together in a course grade should include only assessments of course mastery–and attendance is not an assessment (not of course mastery anyway). Attendance effects on grades are not assessments, they are punishments or rewards. (And grades averaged into a course grade are not punishments or rewards–they are assessments.) This distinction seems to suggest it might be appropriate to treat the two categories differently in terms of how they affect the grade. And indeed, if we’re going to offer a reward to students for some non-mastery-related activity, it seems to make sense, if the reward is going to affect their final grade, for the reward to add or subtract the same number of points from that grade given the same non-mastery-related performance. That’s almost definitionally required if we’re to administer the reward fairly.
Quizzes don’t have to have this property (equal change in number of course grade points for equal performance on the quiz) precisely because they’re not rewards but assessments.
In my opinion, neither student should lose five points. Both should get that grade of 93.7. (If I understood correctly that that’s the grade you get when you average their coursework and don’t take attendance into account.) In other words, not knowing anything about the school or its policies, my opinion is that attendance should have been worth 0% of the grade.
And in my opinion, if attendance must be taken into account for some reason, then almost certainly the cancer victim’s absences can be fairly counted as “excused” and in that case she would recieve the higher grade.
I mentioned above leeway should be given for emergencies and things like that. This isn’t what I meant by “fudge factor.” You can be pretty explicit about what counts as an emergency, and then be consistent about how attendance affects grades. What I was referring to by “fudge factor” would be something like changing the attendance grade of a student in order to raise or lower their course grade based on my intuitive assessment of their dedication or something like that.
If I said policy is that emergencies make absences excused, then if a student brings me a cancer diagnosis and explains it as the reason for her absences, and I count this as an emergency because I think anyone diagnosed with cancer would face undue hardship when it comes to attendance, then I haven’t introduced a “fudge factor” in order to affect a single student’s grade based on what I think of that student’s non-mastery-related attributes.
If the kid’s not there, course work / homework won’t be done. Incomplete, missing etc assignments, unhappily, adversely affect course grades. This fact of life needs to be raised and hammered home the first 2 weeks of class. (You can even put it on pop quizzes).
Make sure the parental units are aware that Betsy is failing because of her shoddy work habits. You might also mention her apparent, previously undocumented chronic health problems, as she misses X% of classes …
Once they hit high school, their lack of preparedness isn’t the teacher’s problem. Teacher’s measure of sympathy can vary, from being a hard-ass (as future employers will in all probability be) to sometimes accepting late assignments, to not keeping records on tardy students at all.
However, I do advise against being all co-dependent with these kids. You aren’t helping them by providing them with a soft place to fall.
an seanchai
It sounds to me like your problem is not designing an attendance policy, but rather that you don’t feel like attendance should be reflected in your grade.
One option for you is to have fairly simple weekly quizzes. That way your students are doing something and are showing some mastery of the materials, but you also have a fair way to give a “zero” to students who don’t show up.
I run a lab-type class (spoken English) and attendance is the majority of my grade. My rule is that attendance is worth 60 percent of your grade. You get two free absences for any reason. After those two absences, each absence knocks down your grade down ten percent. It leads to the vast majority of my students passing, but that is expected at my school.