Because they are billing their environment for working adults. At the end of a course, the measure should be “do you have competency in the material”. There are ways to demonstrate that with a lot more confidence than “was your butt in class while you surfed the Internet on your laptop.”
If the grade was 100% on attendance, you have a point. Personally, I never grade on attendance for just that reason. I still disagree, though. Being in class isn’t neutral. Otherwise, why would you ever go?
Those maybe the facts for you individually, but they are a lot of assumptions made with regard to customer base that I’m not sure are truly proven. Have you inquired of the office of admissions if their experience with that particular segment of students is accurate or not?
I never require attendance for either my non-traditional or my traditional students. My attitude is that if they can pass without attending, more power to 'em. Most of them can’t, but don’t know that. I tell them they are welcome to roll those dice, though. However, they are still expected to get the work in on time, and to take the exams when scheduled. I give them a schedule for the semester on the first day of class and stick to it whenever possible. It’s their responsibility to make the right choice for them. If that involves not coming, fine - as long as they understand that there may be consequences for that decision, such as missing material or not understanding concepts as well as they could.
I don’t encounter this much, but when I do, hoo boy. The student who says “I’m raising a family and working full-time and caring for an ill parents - I don’t have time to do all this work for your class!” Listen, my school is not one of those that you just pay your money and get a piece of paper. I have academic standards to meet, both as a professional and for the institution and state. I can’t give you a grade just because you enrolled - you actually have to demonstrate competence on the assignments and exams. If your schedule doesn’t allow you sufficient time to learn the material, that’s not my fault.
And the “my tuition pays your salary” argument makes me LOL. My base salary is close to 45K, so let’s use that figure for the purposes of this little example. I teach six classes a semester, but I’m required to teach five, but always teach one more for a little extra. My average enrollment in my classes is 30 students. I teach 15-week semesters.
Salary = $45K with all of it being paid from collected tuition. This isn’t true in any institution, but let’s use it for the example.
Weeks per year = 30
Students per class = 30.
Teaching load = 5/5.(This translates to fifteen hours in the classroom per week, which is how much students AND the public think we actually work, ignoring grading, advising, office hours, lesson plan development, committee work, meetings, writing, etc.)
The math:
(30 wk/yr) x (15 hr/wk) x (30 students/hr) = 13500 student-sessions per year.
($45,000/yr) / (13500 student-sessions/yr) = $3.33 per student-session.
So, even IF my ENTIRE salary was paid by tuition, students would only be paying me a little over $3 per class.
No it isn’t necessiarily neutral. But people who have to be rewarded in order to attend aren’t the folks you want to reward.
The school I work at has been traditionally considered a commuter collage. Our average student age is around 26. We offer a lot of class sections at night. Especially the basic academic courses like English, history, Literature and Spanish. Working students usually can take most of their first two years of undergrad requirements at night if they want.
When you take classes for your major it gets harder to find night sections. Especially in the smaller academic departments. There’s not that many professors and they prefer working in the day. The senior level classes are rarely offered at night. There may only be couple sections of each class and they’ll be in the daytime.
Our school is changing. They built the first dorms about ten years ago. We are starting to attract more kids right out of high school. As more dorms get built we may not be a commuter school twenty years from now.
Not to mention that most human beings start getting tired at night. I taught a night class, due to a schedule conflict not for working people, and despite the fact that everyone who took it was young (me too) I could feel the attention flagging as time went on. I can just imagine what it would have been like if the students had been working all day.
Two people working for me got degrees while working, one a PhD, and I respect them for it, but it is pretty hard. There is nothing a college can do to create time for school.
As a student, listening to my fellow students complain how they’re too busy doing other things to actually do schoolwork annoys the hell out of me. So night/commuter/non-traditional students should not get a pass “just because,” but if I’m taking a non-traditional course, I do expect it to be structured in a way that reflects the nature of the course. The example given earlier about an assignment being given in the morning, due at the end of that same day? That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t matter how easy the assignment is: sometimes we don’t have time. Same-day-due assignments would be just as bad in a traditional class setting.
I had one online class where we all had to do an essay and post it on Tuesdays by 11:59pm. Then we had to reply to someone who chose a different topic than ours by 11:59 on Wednesday. It was incredibly inconvenient under the best circumstances. You cannot do it early, as your work depended on your classmates. Want to guess how many people did it early? Me. Then if someone did manage to write an essay early, there was a 1 in 3 chance it was the same topic you wrote. And don’t even get me started on the incoherent messes that were posted. I mean, how can you constructively respond to someone who sounds like they ran their essay through Babelfish a dozen times and looks like they use punctuation as decoration? Oh, and while almost no one did their work early, very few people ended up doing it on time, either. Having your students’ work depend on other students’ work is very risky, especially when you’re a horrible instructor who accepts late work with no penalties and gives a tiny turnaround time.
So I managed to get everything in on time, but it was extremely frustrating and made the class more stressful than it needed to be. I couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t have 48 hours (as was the standard in every other class I’d taken at that school). I found a student who happened to be in another of that same prof’s class. Their work was due on Thursday, reply on Friday. They were getting screwed too! It would have been so much better if we were on a Tues-Thurs schedule and they were on a Wed-Friday schedule, but the prof liked to compartmentalize, apparently. This wasn’t a problem through the whole school, but just one instructor who was freaking insane (there were many, many other things she did that were crazy. This was sane in comparison) and didn’t think about the ramifications. The attitude would have been “You make this a priority” instead of having the class reflect the needs of its students to a reasonable extent instead of the instructor’s needs (which she would complain about at length and then delete all her messages.)