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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

At my university in New Zealand they didn't take attendance for lectures. You attended the lectures so you could learn stuff so you could pass the exams. It's surprising that isn't considered normal.

(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)

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That's how it was for me in college in the USA.

As an aside, it's a little absurd that people wouldn't go to class given how much money they're paying.

Private colleges are around $39k USD per year. That's a lot of dough per class-hour.

For NZ citizens to go to university it's only around $5k NZD per year and most degrees are only three years, except for a few which are four.

That's the thing though, in many places Europe people usually aren't paying much for university, and higher education is funded by the state. So the state has a keen financial interest on people not failing/doing over because they can't be bothered to go to lectures, a lot more than the students themselves.

The reality in my experience is that, whilst students are on paper adults (mostly) and responsible for their own successes and failures, a significant number benefits from being forced to attend. That's unfortunate for the ones that could "safely" skip the lectures and have to go, but on average it leads to better overall outcomes. So in that regard the attendance policies are sensible.

I only paid 50 bucks per month to study at university — there were many classes I never visited only wrote the exams

I was lax about going to certain classes. Not always because of laziness (though, I'll admit it was occasionally a factor) but often because the format of one person, who lacked any particular talent for teaching, reading mostly from notes or scribbling incomprehensible symbology on a blackboard in a room filed with hundreds of people wasn't really a teaching format that did anything for me.

Hm, I had good teachers who were also researchers in their respective fields. Mostly. I wonder if this is another symptom of the USA's general hypernormalization - sounds like they're going through the motions, without the substance. They're using distilled water in the hydroponic supply.

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