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Originally Posted by zakthor
But (other than for real safety stuffs) what is even the point of checking attendance? Is the school somehow unable to evaluate whether the student knows the material when they leave the class? Student writes their essays, takes their tests, stands before an evaluation board, etc, etc. Thats the proof of learning which is aligned with existence of school. Who cares if they've even read the syllabus? Your situation makes it sound like some bureaucratic anti-truancy high school damage has found its way into higher learning.
Is a distinction between going to class to learn real stuff and going to class as a performance and jump through hoops.
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Depends on what course, etc. (some certification tracks or headed-for-state-licensing things require N contact hours and track it per-student). Can depend on college admin, either department level (ie, math dept requires attendance in anything below college algebra) It also comes down to that whole "academic freedom" thing of how an instructor thinks it is best to evaluate your learning - that whole "A for effort" deal...
Had one programming instructor (javascript/css/html) who couldn't program her way out of a wet paper bag that graded on multiple choice exams (40%), attendance (25%) and the rest was projects and labs which she did live in front of the students on the projector - all you had to do was retype what she had.
My stats teacher just didn't care if you were there or not, etc. but if you were not in class he wouldn't answer questions on homework/quizzes. And if you didn't attempt the (optional, ungraded) homework, he'd not help you after bad quizzes/exams.
Some teachers think that you cannot learn something unless you sit in their presence for 45 minutes to an hour and a half listening them drone on with bad powerpoints and such being displayed on projector.
Personally my Intro to Linux course is aimed at the LPI cert and the content is all provided by Cisco via NetAcademy. I get to fill things in with hands on experience in class, so class time is almost all laba time. Grading is straight out of Ciscos content, with weekly labs and two exams. With my Linux Services course, I expect students to do a little bit of reading beforehand - maybe 4 pages max per week - and I spend about 10 minutes doing a overview of it all, a demo of how things work, and then the rest of class is lab time, so they can implement a router, dhcp server, dns server, file server, web server, and mail server with me sitting there to help them get unstuck when they skip a step and don't RTFM.
I also assume that they've actually learned what the course description for all of the prior classes say they should learn and end up having to take extra time to do things like explain exactly how various protocols work, much less the Linux implementations of them.
I've noticed the quality of my incoming students has decreased. We've also lost all of our competent full time faculty with industry experience, and we're about to relocate the entire ITE program to a branch campus, so many adjuncts are considering leaving. I'm in that list - since I have no control over the quality of our program, I'm not going to be involved with a ***** program and having to go to the branch campus will kill my free time between full time job and teaching and then add an extra 20 minutes to drive home at night.