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This is also how teaching went for me. I found out why teachers have attendance policies, quizzes, and all the other things that, as a student, seemed inane, if not counterproductive, to me. While those things sometimes are, and can be overly punitive or poorly applied (like anything, much of the apparatus around teaching can be done better or done worse), I now get why instructors do those things.

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I also think there's always going to be a question of which students you are optimizing for. I had a professor that didn't have an attendance policy, but at the start of every year he would show a scatter plot of class attendance versus final grade with a fit line showing decent correlation. Of course if you looked closer, the effect was mostly that very good attendance led to A's. Low attendance was a crapshoot on the plot, with every letter grade represented including many of the A+'s.

The students that attended didn't need an attendance policy because they were inclined to attend anyway. The question is how much forced attendance would have improved the scores of the bad performance/low attendance group versus how much it would have hurt the good performance/low attendance group (including missed opportunities at the same time slot). I don't see a policy that realistically helps all of the struggling students without hurting any of the top students, so a tradeoff has to be made.

Perhaps offering attendance as extra credit without making it a penalty could be a good middle ground, but I don't think it would help all of the low attendance/poor performance students. By the time they realize they need extra credit they would already be behind, and they may not care about an extra credit offer at the start of the semester.

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