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Comment by wahern | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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 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.

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

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