So many people absent today; it's November 19th

[polly_mer]

It strikes me that having no attendance is the more libertarian approach -- let the students sink or swim on their own. There were remarkably few support services available when I was a student. The US system is strikingly different at most place -- with lots of effort to retain students and policies for the students' own good, giving them less freedom. I'd characterize it as more of a "nanny" approach. On the other hand, it is much more common for US students to have a lot of other responsibilities, especially jobs, while they are undergraduates. Maybe that explains the differences.

Some of the differences are just the passage of time.  I did all my education in US public schools.  My undergrad was very much sink or swim with the strong assertion that a good third to half the entering class would not complete.  We had no tutoring, but we did have recitations (group problem solving with a TA/professor) for most intro classes. 

Occasionally, we'd get a new humanities faculty member at this STEM-focused institution who would try to enforce attendance because discussion-based classes do fail miserably if no one attends, but it was an uphill battle for them when we had physics and math faculty teaching mandatory-for-all classes who discouraged attendance with the assertion that one should do a ton of problems and ask questions as necessary to learn the material.

Other differences are related to the mindset of why college exists.  If the goal is to have motivated enough, bright enough people learn content and practice critical thinking, then one can expect people to rise to the occasion and feel no guilt as people self-select out to do something else.  If the goal is to have as many people as possible start the program and then complete the program, then one has to put a lot more effort into supporting everyone, especially if many people starting the program are underprepared and under motivated with complicated lives.

One weird American thing is how many people in the college system are not ready for college nor interested in college and yet the assumption is they have to get through instead of weeding for people who can succeed.

[spork]

I will add: studies indicate that undergrads now regard paying for college as a much greater concern than in the past and that time spent on academics has decreased considerably (in part because students are working longer hours in part-time/full-time jobs). So if ditching class is associated in students' minds with low cost/high benefit, then they'll ditch class.

Accreditation bodies and the federal government insisting that learning = time in classroom = credit hour is a major problem. My undergraduate courses are effectively hybrid in terms of how students engage with material, yet my students are punished with a requirement that they be physically in a classroom for X hours per week. Meanwhile I'm teaching the same stuff in online courses where there is no such requirement.

[downer]

Yes, online courses are where it is more a matter of self-education for students. And I recall that the fail and withdrawal rates for them is higher than for face to face classes. Online classes are more sink or swim.

I had an online assignment due last night. Cruel of me, I guess, but we are running out of track for this semester. A lot of students didn't do it.

[marshwiggle]

Other differences are related to the mindset of why college exists.  If the goal is to have motivated enough, bright enough people learn content and practice critical thinking, then one can expect people to rise to the occasion and feel no guilt as people self-select out to do something else.  If the goal is to have as many people as possible start the program and then complete the program, then one has to put a lot more effort into supporting everyone, especially if many people starting the program are underprepared and under motivated with complicated lives.

One weird American thing is how many people in the college system are not ready for college nor interested in college and yet the assumption is they have to get through instead of weeding for people who can succeed.

I put a lot of this down to what I call "democracy-run-amok".  In countries like the UK, with a historical class system, the idea that different people have different abilities and interests is taken for granted*. But in the US particularly, and to a slightly lesser extent in Canada, the idea that everyone is "equal" is so much of a mantra that it leads to the totally unscientific but highly ideological suggestion that everyone should be able to succeed at whatever they want.  This leads to the ridiculous idea that it's "the system's fault" if anyone struggles.

*Even if at one time this was assumed to be much more based on biology than culture, it's hardly surprising that an awful lot of people choose careers, place to settle down, etc. similar to that of their parents. The fact is that a lot of peoples' choices are fairly predictable statistically.

[Caracal]

Accreditation bodies and the federal government insisting that learning = time in classroom = credit hour is a major problem. My undergraduate courses are effectively hybrid in terms of how students engage with material, yet my students are punished with a requirement that they be physically in a classroom for X hours per week. Meanwhile I'm teaching the same stuff in online courses where there is no such requirement.

It doesn't seem terribly unreasonable that students should be expected to come to class if the class is a face to face class. There's a different question about whether that expectation needs to be communicated directly through an attendance grade, but I'd say something is wrong if the class is face to face but many students aren't getting much benefit from coming to class.

[polly_mer]

but I'd say something is wrong if the class is face to face but many students aren't getting much benefit from coming to class.

That shows your discipline bias.  Yes, if the point is to discuss and practice our ideas on our feet, then we do have to prepare for class and then attend to get the full benefit.

However, if the class is mostly content followed by applying that content in different contexts, then I and many students can read the book and work through the examples ourselves.  That was a great way to go through classes where the point was to take one concept (e.g., energy is conserved) and apply it up, down, and sideways in a variety of contexts (yep, still conserved in falling; still conserved with chemical reactions generating more energy; still conserved with a flowing fluid that is both reacting and being cooled on the outside of the pipe).

When the practice is in class with other humans, then people have to go to class to practice with other humans.  When the practice is mostly one person thinking hard with the need for other humans limited to asking questions to get to the next thinking hard part, then class presenting a variety of problems may be much less useful than one-on-one or small group for half an hour focusing on a specific problem that is particularly tricky.

[downer]

but I'd say something is wrong if the class is face to face but many students aren't getting much benefit from coming to class.

That shows your discipline bias.  Yes, if the point is to discuss and practice our ideas on our feet, then we do have to prepare for class and then attend to get the full benefit.

Hmm. That seems to misread Caracal's point. I take the point to be that for it to be reasonable to require students to come to class, the class needs to be useful in some way.

It may be that many classes are not useful to people. Certainly if you are just lecturing, then the lectures could be placed online and students could view them at home. Or maybe better, they could view lectures by world experts on the topic at hand.

My attendance policy is that if students miss class, they need to write a detailed summary of the readings to make up the missing class. They can do this as much as they want. If I were in my class, I'd probably stay home and do the detailed summaries rather than to come to class, because that way I would get a better understanding of them than by listening to a lecture on them. And I would save a lot of commuting time. But mostly students prefer to come to class and hear my own summaries and explanations rather than have to actually do the reading.

[Wahoo Redux]

I and many students can read the book and work through the examples ourselves.

Personally I think we can do away with these irritating, expensive, and ineffective colleges altogether and their differences between disciplines and threats of unionization once and for all.

I suggest a B.A. or B.S. should be conferred to anyone who reads all of Wikipedia.  All of it. The whole thing from A to Z.  (One simply need designate which degree----it doesn't really matter under these circumstances).  We'll just take your word on completion. 

An M.A./M.S. should be conferred on anyone who watches all the documentaries on a particular subject on Netflix.

The Ph.D. should be conferred with the documentaries on a particular subject found on Amazon Prime and not less than 10 thoughtful reviews posted on Amazon Prime.

One need not go farther online than this!  Stoopid colleges and their differences in discipline!  Who needs all those overpaid professor types and their stoopid classes?

We should also be open to the idea that doctors could be trained by watching McDreamy and McSteamy.

Now the M.B.A. is still going to require a well-funded, well-equipped, sparking new building with state-of-the-art technology and well compensated M.B.A.s at the heads of the classrooms because we know that this is education which must not be skimped. 

[marshwiggle]

I and many students can read the book and work through the examples ourselves.

Personally I think we can do away with these irritating, expensive, and ineffective colleges altogether and their differences between disciplines and threats of unionization once and for all.

If a person wants simply to learn, especially now with all of the resources available, a person can do so without any sort of institution. However, if a person wants a credential, i.e. something to affirm that they have met a set of identifiable goals to establish a certain level of knowledge of a specific subject area, then they need to get a degree or a diploma.

There is nothing about coming to class that magically results in learning, and there are lots of ways people can learn without ever stepping in a classroom. I have group exercises and quizzes in my lectures because people generally do better if they don't miss class, but if a student can learn everything they need to without ever attending I don't have a problem with that. Discussion in groups is a means to an end, i.e. learning, and if that end can be achieved without the classroom, that's perfectly fine.

[spork]

[. . .]

We should also be open to the idea that doctors could be trained by watching McDreamy and McSteamy.

[. . .]

You might be surprised to know that medical school and law school often does very little to prepare people for the actual practice of law or medicine.

[polly_mer]

I and many students can read the book and work through the examples ourselves.

Personally I think we can do away with these irritating, expensive, and ineffective colleges altogether and their differences between disciplines and threats of unionization once and for all.

I suggest a B.A. or B.S. should be conferred to anyone who reads all of Wikipedia.  All of it. The whole thing from A to Z.  (One simply need designate which degree----it doesn't really matter under these circumstances).  We'll just take your word on completion. 

The point of the professor in my undergrad was to set a path and to help along the way.  Selecting which textbook at what rate and which problems to practice in what order to best reinforce the learning was something I could not have easily done on my own. 

However, working the problems is the only way to learn in my fields.  Watching people work the problems with a good explanation of why one made a certain choice could be helpful in some situations, but just watching someone else do it was as useful as trying to learn to ski or swim by watching someone do it.  The professors, subject matter experts, knew that was the case for most of these classes and thus did not insist that attendance alone was the best use of anyone's time since the goal was to master the material.

Different types of knowledge require different means to practice and different ways to get feedback on how that practice is going.  That's a discipline thing.  Reading alone tends to not be sufficient to master either the content or the disciplinary way of thinking.

However, yeah, I'd much rather hire and interact with the autodidact who can learn new things and use them in context than the person who went through college checking all the boxes for behavior over mastering the material.  There's a reason that research indicates that A students without internships or other related experience are less desirable hires than C students with directly related experience (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/the-thing-employers-look-for-when-hiring-recent-graduates/378693/, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/21/study-finds-female-college-graduates-newly-job-market-are-punished-having-good).

[Aster]

I "grade" on attendance by deducting points from extra credit. One absence or one tardy equals one extra point deducted from extra credit. Of course, this means that I have to formalize an extra credit system, but most professors do that anyways. I just take it one step further with a penalty system.

Since it's only "extra" credit that's affected, I make the argument that its outside of the official grading system and I can do whatever I want with it. Removing extra credit does absolutely nothing to harming a student's "regular" grades.

It is remarkable how effective the psychological impact of extra credit (however small) has on students. There seem to be behavioral parallels with coupons.

After starting this policy many years ago, attendance compliance shot up dramatically. Tardiness also dropped dramatically.

[marshwiggle]

I "grade" on attendance by deducting points from extra credit. One absence or one tardy equals one extra point deducted from extra credit. Of course, this means that I have to formalize an extra credit system, but most professors do that anyways. I just take it one step further with a penalty system.

(Going off on a tangent)

Is "extra credit" mainly a US thing? I can't recall it being mentioned in my experiences in Canada, but maybe it's discipline specific.

[Caracal]

I "grade" on attendance by deducting points from extra credit. One absence or one tardy equals one extra point deducted from extra credit. Of course, this means that I have to formalize an extra credit system, but most professors do that anyways. I just take it one step further with a penalty system.

(Going off on a tangent)

Is "extra credit" mainly a US thing? I can't recall it being mentioned in my experiences in Canada, but maybe it's discipline specific.

I don't really remember it existing in college in the US when I attended. Frankly, like others here, I basically use it as a silly trick to make my life marginally easier. We have two more classes left and I wanted students to do some group work reading and discussing some documents. With no reward, I've found that a lot of students in this class would just stare at their phones for 25 minutes. I could have just tied it to the attendance for the day, but that is going to feel to most students like annoying extra work, so I announced that it would count as an extra credit response paper. It worked pretty well in class. Students were reading the sources and discussing them with each other and the group work didn't feel like just killing time.

I already drop 2 response papers over the semester, so now I'll just drop three instead. The actual grade impact of this is going to be tiny. At most, a student could gain a little less than half a point in their overall grade. If I think about the rare student who will benefit from this, it seems fair enough. Over a 1/4 of the class was missing yesterday, so if you were somebody who was right on the border between A/B or B/C, had missed a few response papers over the semester, but bothered to come to class, did this reading and worked with your group, I'm ok with this pushing you over the edge.

[Wahoo Redux]

[. . .]

We should also be open to the idea that doctors could be trained by watching McDreamy and McSteamy.

[. . .]

You might be surprised to know that medical school and law school often does very little to prepare people for the actual practice of law or medicine.

Oh Spork.

Stop it.  Geeze.

I come from a family of doctors and lawyers. 

Maybe you should take a vacation to Antigua or something, relax a bit.