There very well may be University of Wisconsin students with perfect attendance records. After all, in a population of more than 40,000 students there ought to be some statistical outliers who show up five minutes early to every class, week in week out, for four straight years – an attendance record that would make Cal Ripken Jr. proud.
Let me be clear: I’m not one of those Ripken types – my attendance record dropped off precipitously at some point in October during my sophomore year. If my mother were reading this, she’d probably be appalled – she did her best to instill in me the virtue of being, as they said at my grade school, “prompt, punctual and prepared for learning.” If I’ve strayed from that, the fault is my own. Still, mediocre attendance never had too much impact on my academic performance.
However, many UW courses do take attendance into consideration when determining a final grade. I’ll never forget sitting through mind-numbing general chemistry lectures, holding a $60 i>clicker that was a required purchase at the UW Bookstore and watching my professor manipulate base ten logarithms and solve quadratic equations for upwards of half an hour. Tomorrow, I’m going to attend an American literature lecture; after the lecture, I’m going to check in with my TA and put an X in a box on an attendance chart to prove I was there. After all, how would I learn anything about American literature if I weren’t there to listen to a subjective rehashing of “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”? Oh, yeah, I can read – but I’m not bitter or anything.
It’s my sincere opinion that in most cases, in particular large lectures, class attendance should not be used as a measure of academic success. What I mean is that unless the substance of a course requires interactive participation – that is, excluding small, discussion-based seminars, labs, etc. – a student’s grade in the course should not reflect his or her attendance or lack thereof.
Critics of students who skip class will often remark, “As a college student, you pay X for every lecture, and you are a fool if you don’t attend them.” (At this university, X is $19.32 for residents, and $49.23 for nonresidents). There’s another way to look at the situation. As a college student, you pay X for every class. Is it not the university’s responsibility to offer classes that are so engaging, so interesting and so informative, that you feel inclined to attend them on a regular basis?
After all, as students at UW, we’ve chosen voluntarily to pay tuition and pursue higher education; this isn’t high school. We are here at UW because for whatever reason, we feel a university-level education will further our life goals. That said, it seems absurd that we should be academically penalized for not attending a lecture that we don’t consider beneficial. Rather, professors should be held responsible for the quality of their lectures.
Simply put, grading a course based on attendance does reward students if they are able to recall information from lectures, which maybe neither factual or important, and all too often tends toward the subjective and esoteric. To the extent that it implicitly rewards students who can explain in great detail an academic subject as their professor sees it, grading based on attendance does not encourage students to independently form their own understandings and opinions. My concern is that such a policy hinders the intellectual freedom of students at this university.
This is probably as appropriate a time as any to quote the “sifting and winnowing” plaque on Bascom Hall. An excerpt from a report of the Board of Regents in 1894, the plaque reads, “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the Great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”
A myopic focus on attendance as a measure of learning doesn’t hold professors accountable for the quality of their teaching, and it certainly doesn’t encourage students to fearlessly sift and winnow. And yet, there’s a reason someone saw fit to immortalize that statement at the top of Bascom Hill – the University of Wisconsin has, historically speaking, valued an intellectual environment in which independent thought and respectful, argumentative debate are encouraged. My hope is that it continues to be such a place.
Charles Godfrey ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in physics and math.
