Two truths and a lie: I’m almost legally blind; I have five siblings; I love mandatory class attendance. Believe it or not, but waking up for an 8 a.m. biology lecture is not how I’d like to start every morning — so freshman year, I slept in. 

By no means am I encouraging anyone to skip class. I love academia; I love learning. But at the same time, I cannot stand behind any course syllabus mandating class attendance. 

Obviously I’m not talking about classes or labs that involve students taking hands-on approaches. You should be going to your chemistry lab. I’m calling out those classes — usually gen eds, but definitely some upper level courses — where you sit down in a hard plastic chair for an hour listening to an instructor read from the same powerpoint you could’ve read yourself from a couch. Teachers should not assign attendance points for this practice. 

You reap what you sow. If you can learn the material and complete the assignments without leaving the margins of your bedroom, then go for it. Who cares? The tuition has already been paid for. You’ll discover on test day if your learning process is effective or not. Bad grade? Try going to your lecture. Bad grade again? It’s more than just your attendance. 

Dr. Lynn Herrmann,  associate professor of public health and health education in the school of health studies at NIU, takes a more balanced approach to the topic. She understands it to be a non-issue. “You’re paying tuition, I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to come to class,” Herrmann said. “You wouldn’t pay for food and not pick up.” 

That being said, she gets it, things happen. Send an email; all is well. What’s not so cool is when it becomes habitual. It’s chronic absences that’ll raise some eyebrows, requiring legitimate documentation to relax them, especially if the professor wants to give you a hard time.

Before you go turning off your morning alarms, it’d be an injustice to not acknowledge the clear, directly proportional relationship between class attendance and student performance. 

Writing for Macmillan Learning, Jeff Bergin and Lisa Ferarra write that class attendance provides noncontent-specific contextual information that otherwise wouldn’t be found in a textbook. Put simply, literally listening to your professor’s lecture helps you digest the material, no surprises there. Making it to class also helps to keep you on track with what’s expected. Having a weak memory myself, I find hearing my professor’s reminders about upcoming assignments and exams during class to be super helpful and far easier to comprehend than a NIUBb-NoReply email hiding in my Outlook. 

While there certainly are pros, there are definitely cons. During the age of pandemics, I should be allowed to stay home if I don’t feel well, just as I would hope my peers would do the same. However, professors who only permit excused absences upon recievinga doctor’s note isn’t just inconvenient – it’s classist. The reality is that seeking medical care can be expensive, even with health insurance. Not everyone has the financial freedom to see a doctor whenever. 

Though Dr. Herrmann does make an excellent point in that the existence of documentation generally serves to protect the student in the event of a professor-student conflict. Be that as it may, professors shouldn’t mandate that I pay for an expensive slip of paper to miss class, nor do I feel I owe them an explanation in the first place.