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Mandatory attendance and homework in higher education
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| Lira |
Long Version: I've been teaching in higher education for some 10 years now and, as a lecturer, I've always been quite the libertarian: if you take the exams and show you know the subject, I won't penalise you for absences and/or homework. I mean, if you know what I had to teach, why hold you back?
This always ensured the most interested students would show up and, should a good student need to be absent for a period of time and/or fail to make a minor assignment, they wouldn't be penalised. The bad students that failed to show up knew they were to blame, and the bad students that did show up would be grateful for the extra time I could devote to them. And this worked perfectly... until last semester.
Long story short, the bad students that showed up said they were no longer feeling like going to class because some of their friends were absent and they thought this wasn't fair. I told them this would only increase the chances they'd fail and, when the push came to shove, nearly a third did - and then complained the homework I assigned was "boring" and "it didn't change their grades", reason they didn't study at home. I was gobsmacked. My supervisor shrugged it off and said the students should've seen it coming, although he also said it would be better if I came up with a solution because, according to the rules, attendance is mandatory (albeit weakly enforced), and we could all do without this drama.
And that's why I thought I'd get an idea of what it is like in other countries.
Short version: What is it like where you graduated? Was attendance mandatory? Were you graded for your homework (besides tests, exams)? Was there a creative professor who devised a system you liked? |
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| AlphaStarred |
| I once had a math professor who dressed in pajamas, looked like he never washed his hair, and used to tell us how nobody in the faculty liked him, but couldn't fire him due to him being tenured. He used to walk out of class during exams, letting us cheat. Good times. |
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| Lira |
:stongue:
I hope my students see me as a bit more hardworking than that :p |
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| Sushipunk |
Attendance wasn't "mandatory" when I was in uni, but for a lot of subjects the lecturers/tutors would assign 10% of the final grade to attendance. So basically, if you miss a bunch of classes, you're damaging your grade just by not being there (exemptions were given for illness etc.)
Tons of people still didn't turn up much though :wtf:
We weren't graded on homework, but we had pretty constant assignments/papers/etc. to do which we were graded on. If we missed or failed any of those, we were definitely damaging our grades. All of that stuff was completely up-front, ie. "this assignment is worth whatever percent of your final grade". |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
tutorials were mandatory at the 2 unis i went to, but never lectures. though there was one guy who lectured in a smaller theatre and that cunt would eyeball you if you left early. stupid australian history, what did those faggots ever do for anyone?
i once skipped so many lectures in one particular unit that i missed an entire assessment worth 20% of my grade, oops. you'd think someone might've mentioned we had work due or something, but noooo. bastards. |
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| Sushipunk |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
tutorials were mandatory at the 2 unis i went to, but never lectures. |
Yeah sorry, actually now that you mention it, it was the same at my uni. The tutors were the ones keeping attendance notes, not the lecturers. Still 10% of grades. So long ago, . How can I be expected to remember this stuff? :p
Some of my lectures were 400+ people every week, so it's a little hard to police that for attendance. Though that was first year, before half the class decided uni was too hard, lol. |
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| JEO |
In my "uni" the course designer / lecturer always got to define beforehand if attendance should have any impact on your grade. Usually only exams and presentations were mandatory to attend, but you would of course get shamed for asking a stupid question on a lecture if the subject had been handled on previous lectures.
| quote: | Originally posted by AlphaStarred
I once had a math professor who dressed in pajamas, looked like he never washed his hair, and used to tell us how nobody in the faculty liked him, but couldn't fire him due to him being tenured. He used to walk out of class during exams, letting us cheat. Good times. |
Some of our exams were the kind where the lecturer was always available to help you during the exam and we got to take our notes with us, sometimes use the internet etc. That was mostly because during my time they had done things like squeeze a 15 ects course to 2 ects with the exact same competence required as in the 15 ects course. So 405 hours became 54 hours to reach a required competence in math for an old C++ 3d engine. Naturally everyone needed help and the whole thing just felt like passing us all on the course regardless of what we learned to boost statistics or something and just splurt us out of there, knowing we'd all already have a job when we graduate. So I just found a job and quit the whole thing. |
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| Jon_Snow |
In the states it commonly plays a small part of your final grade like 10%. I think it's not a bad idea because part of education is preparing students for the real world. You'll be quickly out of job if only show up when you like. Success in life is often determined by hard work and attitude.
Btw I'm flabbergasted you used the word gobsmacked. |
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| Silky Johnson |
Attendance was not mandatory, and homework was not graded. The expectation at that level is that students are able to manage their workload independently, without spoon-feeding and/or micro management.
At the end of the day, we're paying for our education so it's our prerogative to take it as seriously (or not) as we want to. The only person who suffers in the end is the student.
Mind you, most courses would have small weekly assignments (formal discussion contributions with citations, posts to a message board with citations, etc) worth 5% each, so I suppose that counts as graded homework, as it was all related to the required readings. |
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| Jon_Snow |
| I get the feeling Brazilian students are more lackadaisical because higher ed isn't as expensive or free? |
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| ziptnf |
| quote: | Originally posted by Silky Johnson
Attendance was not mandatory, and homework was not graded. The expectation at that level is that students are able to manage their workload independently, without spoon-feeding and/or micro management.
At the end of the day, we're paying for our education so it's our prerogative to take it as seriously (or not) as we want to. The only person who suffers in the end is the student. |
This. All the best professors I ever had didn't give a if you showed up or not, they were there to teach and do their job, and if you didn't want to attend the lecture, that's completely on you. However, this was only related to the engineering courses I took. The business school and other main courses in the University actually did take attendance.
In general, homework was graded and counted for maybe 10% of your grade, so I would do it even if I didn't get it all completed or answered correctly.
If attendance is mandatory, I guess just count it as 5-10% of their grade. Do you believe in extra credit? If you have struggling students, perhaps that would be a possible solution. For the most part though, I think it's bull that you have to babysit these kids, they are adults now, they are in complete control of their decisions to make it to class or not, and you shouldn't have to call their names every day to make sure they showed up. If they fail the tests, you will know who showed up and who didn't. |
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| SYSTEM-J |
Attendance was supposedly mandatory during seminars, but not lectures. The penalty was that if your attendance went below 50% you could supposedly get thrown off the course, although I never saw this put to the test. As it was an English course, "homework" was mainly reading the set text. We'd have a couple of "formative" essays a year, which you were graded on but didn't count towards your grade. Essentially practise runs. The real essays were called "summative" assignments.
Some of my attendance was absolutely piss-poor at uni. There was one two hour seminar on a Friday morning in my final year (by which point you'd have thought I'd have got my together), and I only scraped a 50% attendance for the year by turning up to the final seminar at the end of the year. I found an old email the other day where I apologised to the tutor for my abject attendance, using the excuse "I'm finding it very hard to get in for 9am". ing hell. And this was when I lived a literal ten minute walk from the building!
Come to think of it, my attitude and behaviour in general was piss-poor. Back then it was completely normal for me to go to sleep at 3am every night, and wake up anytime after mid-day. During the crunch periods they used to have the library open 24/7, and all four of us living in the same house managed to ruin our sleeping pattern so utterly that we would wake up at 6-7pm in the evening, go to the library sometime after midnight and work until the sun came up. We did that for a solid month.
Every single essay would not only be handed in on the deadline day, but actually finished in the library on the afternoon of the deadline day, and very often hand-couriered at a sweaty sprint down to the pigeonhole where we handed in paper copies of our assignment, to get them in before the 4pm submission deadline. Nothing was proof-read. I remember one essay in my final year - a summative. I woke up at about noon on the deadline day with absolutely none of it written. I wrote it all in the space of three hours, printed it off on my housemate's laser printer, and sprinted all the way to the campus to get it in the pigeonhole at about 3:58pm. I don't think I'd eaten anything all day.
Looking back, my negligence and slackness towards something my parents were bank-rolling to the tune of something close to £20,000 in total was ing appalling. I was a lazy streak of piss at that age. The only saving grace was that I somehow graduated with a first class degree.
To return parabolically to the original point, at that age I thought it was affront that you could be kicked off your course for poor attendance. We were paying good money (or someone's good money, at any rate) for this education. We were customers. We should be allowed to do whatever the hell we wanted with all that expensive education we'd purchased. Nowadays I'm more inclined to think that any student who complains about being made to attend is, at best, an entitled and lazy wit, and would clearly benefit from being stringently policed into fulfilling the solitary worthwhile obligation they have at that age. |
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