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Comment by ngngngng | Hacker News Reader

A well known religious University near me just started offering "in person" (wink wink) classes where attendance would not be taken. I was proud to see it.

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Actually, most universities don't take attendance. It's a waste of time, it punishes pro-social behavior (there is no good reason for people feeling sick to go to class), and it's infantilizing. "Attendance required" often means "we will notice if you never attend, and then will feel less bad failing you if you don't do your homework either".

My law school classes took attendance. Rigorously. Because time management is a critical skill for attorneys, judges don't tolerate any amount of unannounced absenteeism, and missing filing deadlines can be and often is extremely costly, not just for you but for your client. (Also, taking attendance weeds out the liars. The ABA has strict attendance requirements and you're not supposed to get a degree if you miss them.)

If was a very tough transition because, of course, both in undergraduate and in professional life lackadaisical attitudes were tolerated, especially so long as you otherwise performed the substantive work.

We all love to rationalize away those things we dislike doing. But there was no wiggle room to rationalize it away in law school. I'm sure the military is similar.

I think small classes and discussions (like in law school) are a different breed than large lectures. My view has always been that if the class is less than 10 or so students, attendance can be required. The students should be given the ability to email for an absence, no questions asked. In these cases, the success of the class is entirely dependent on students attending. If they don't, the class fails.

Military you're trying to teach a hundred things besides just the material, so I think it's really fitting there.

> I'm sure the military is similar.

Ironically, Roll Call is a formal concept in the military and rarely used after training. But the concept of accountability certainly exists.

This varies by country, branch of service, and job, but it’s fairly common for young airmen (enlisted troops) in the USAF to be docked pay after showing up late to work a few times. The punishment usually goes something like a stern warning-> light paperwork-> paperwork in your permanent file and formal counseling. The next step is non-judicial punishment (named so because your only option is to accept the harsh punishment or be court martialed), which could mean any combination of confinement, demotion, forfeiture of pay, or several other things. The only things left after that are being discharged or sent to prison. And that’s for being late to work. If you backtalk the wrong person you could be demoted with no warning.

And I know the Air Force Academy takes attendance every class because I had to. The registrar would occasionally audit the attendance system and notify the department chairs of instructors that didn’t log their attendance.

Muster is taken every day, every watch, in the Navy at least. It's a formal process with a formal report that is submitted to the ship's admin department, and then they submit a muster report up to the ship's immediate superior.

It's taken very seriously.

Is that for all lectures? In the engineering program at my university, attendance as only taken during labs as those have strict attendance requirements.

I doubt that's why law school classes take attendance. To take the bar you need to graduate from a law school (with rare exception) so the law school has an incentive to pretend they are an essential part of the process and something important is happening in class.

It would be embarrassing to the school and the idea of continued employment of the professors if it was revealed how easy it is to pass the law school classes and the bar without ever attending a lecture.

Most universities don't require attendance, but quite a number of professors do take attendance and count it as part of the grade.

There were plenty courses where at the beginning of each lecture, we were asked to complete a trivial quiz (one question quiz) with iClickr. I believe that it was just a convenient way of taking attendance.

This depends largely on the state, and whether it's a public or private school.

Because for some schools, it's all about that FTE (Full Time Equivalent, a measure of how many students are taking how many classes, and how some state schools get their chunk of funding.) And while FTE isn't directly related to attendance more State legislatures/University boards are combining the two and want to make sure that their funds are being spent wisely and students are actually in class.

Also accrediting bodies like to know that students are actually showing up as well.

So while taking attendance is silly for college students, it's not a waste of time or silly for the powers that be.

(I know this because my friends who teach are now being chastised if they don't keep daily attendance records.)

If my 2000 person intro to computer science class required roll call, not only would everyone not fit in the lecture hall, but attendance would take the whole class period.

When I attended Caltech, it was institute policy that taking attendance was prohibited and attendance was not a requirement for the grade.

But I did discover that skipping class was not an option for me.

I did enjoy, however, being treated like an adult for the first time in my life.

I have only just graduated and attendance was regularly taken and part of our grade in some instances(CS degree.)

I'm about to graduate from UWaterloo now and have only had 2 courses with attendance - language courses. I really liked the option of going to classes when I wanted as I found that end up being on my laptop during class anyway.

Two CS courses(1st year) had a clicker thing going on where you had to answer questions and it'd be worth 5% of the grade. Some courses also had a key chunk of info taken out of the pdfs so as to incentivize going to class. I definitely wasn't a big fan, but it wasn't hard to learn about the topics from other university's notes available online

Average university that admits lots of foreign students take attendance including biometric attendance. This is especially true for universities where students are in constant crosshair of ICE/USCIS etc. This is done not because University cares about you attending but they have to comply with the law.

If you admit a student from Pakistan in your Santa Clara campus but ICE finds the student working in New Jersey, the student gets deported and University admin might face criminal charges. So any university where this is a risk factor, takes attendance seriously.

In some cases US federal government has setup fraudulent universities themselves, worked actively with Dept. of State to promote these universities in India and to Indian students studying in other universities as "no need to attend" university and then entrapped these students and their employers.

The attendance taking and biometric attendance sounds completely made up. I’ve lots of international students as friends and no one has made any passing mention of this and I’ve never seen this ever.

> take attendance including biometric attendance. This is especially true for universities where students are in constant crosshair of ICE/USCIS

A university whose 90-100% students are foreign students. These are always on the radar of ICE and DHS.

I figured some universities would start doing things like this. You can even make the class special in that it's pass/fail, doesn't affect your GPA, doesn't appear in your transcript, it's a special class that is free and doesn't increase your tuition, etc. Glad to know it's no longer going to be required to pull moves like this.

The criteria was actual not very challenging to meet. I think part of the reason they backed off was because the intent was not enforceable.

Loopholes work until a judge uses their ability to exercise judgment and judges that they don't work.

Some people refuse to accept that laws are administered by humans.

I guess they understand that behind all the symbolism religion should be about welfare. Kudos.

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