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Comment by p1necone | Hacker News Reader

Is it common for North American universities to take attendance? Seems like a whole lot of effort to gain little and infantilize your students. They're paying tuition, and if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments. And if they don't fail their exams/assessments then clearly mandating lecture attendance for them wasn't necessary anyway.

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I was punished by getting into grad school, going to the "meet the faculty" party, and having my Algorithms professor greet me with "oh, you're the one who never came to class". (I can't resist pointing out, now that it's safe, that it seemed like his TA taught quite a few of his classes...)

You misunderstand. The customer is the government, which pays for student education through 'student loans'. The government is an absentee farmer who pays a farm labourer to produce a crop many years in the future. The labourer would rather take the money and plant nothing, so the absentee landlord farmer wants him to send photos of the seed being planted.

But why won't the crop grow on its own? It is strongly incentivized to live! And yet it does not. So you need to send photos of tilling the soil, planting the seed, watering, so that one day we might come there and see a harvested crop.

> if they don't show up to class they get punished by not learning enough and subsequently failing their exams/assessments

My (UK) University was very clear that attendance was not mandatory, but if you weren't attending lectures you were not going to get any extra help from the lecturers etc

I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take, but it's nice if you _know_ rather than _guess_ who bothered to make it in to class.

It's a protection for the faculty and students.

If you fail someone who rarely attended class, and they claim that they did, asked you for support, and never received it, how might you defend yourself?

If you have an excellent student who encounters a hardship, how might you petition for leniency to allow them to drop without penalty beyond a cutoff, or delay submitting final grades until they can complete makeup work?

In my experience it’s common for large intro level classes. While I personally never liked these policies, I do think it’s beneficial to the average student to incentivize attendance. Think 18 year olds who aren’t able to self regulate or fully understand the consequences until it’s too late. A “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality just hurts the average quality of education.

I think it's worth pondering why you feel paying tuition enters the assessment of the situation. The justification would seem to stand on its own either way, right? Or would your opinion change if tuition was free?

Mandatory attendance makes more sense if tuition is free, because it's not the student's resources that are being wasted, it's whoever is paying the universities.

I don't follow how this implies mandatory attendance makes sense in one case but not the other.

If you believe lack of attendance is "wasting resources", then either you think the class isn't doing its part by teaching what students need, or you believe it is and yet students are not learning the material due to lack of attendance. In the former case, the problem is poor teaching, and so attendance isn't the solution. In the latter case, then the same argument would apply regardless of who's paying.

What's the logic here? Is there a third possibility I'm missing?

The logic is, nobody cares if you waste your own tuition money by not attending class, but people do care if you waste somebody else's tuition money.

You didn't answer my question at all. I understand whose money is involved, that had nothing to do with my point.

Ok, let me reframe then. Imagine you paid for someone's tuition. Would you like them to go to class and get the education you paid for? If they, after several years of them not attending lectures, fail to be educated, was your money wasted?

Now imagine you're a big donor. You donate enough money for, say, 10 scholarships. None of them attend class. None of them get degrees. Are you likely to donate again?

Again, I don't think this addressed my point at all. The whole premise that lack of attendance causes a failure in education is contradictory with the assertion that exams/assignments are sufficient for ensuring learning and attendance is not a necessary requirement. You can't argue it both ways just based on who's paying, the arguments are directly contradictory.

If you require attendance to graduate, then your degree signals conformity and grit, and thus has some value to show to employers who care about those stats but can't really measure them any other way.

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