I hate minimum attendance requirements
There’s also a hell of a rant below, but lemme just quickly tell you about the project first.
the project - sad.nithitsuki.com
A web app and dashboard to easily visualize your attendance, and to help you keep track of it.
and lets be honest, if it wasn’t obvious from the title, I made this to skip as many lectures as possible.
I have even made an extension to automatically fetch my attendance from the university’s website, and then display it on the dashboard.
You can check it out at sad.nithitsuki.com. Feel free to contribute over at the repo.
The rant:
I sincerely hate unreasonable minimum attendance requirements. They are such a waste of time, and there must be a better way to ensure that students actually learn.
Don’t we already have so-called “continuous assessment” and “team projects” to ensure that students have a reason to regularly learn and catch up with their peers?
The most common argument of “students will not attend classes if there is no minimum attendance requirement”… SO WHAT GODDAMIT? Let them attend if they want to. Didn’t I pay for the university to sharpen my skills and prove it by testing me?
I don’t remember when university started forcing nanny services down people’s throats to make them forcefully attend the classes they paid for. The only reason I have to sit through dingy, badly designed “classrooms,” with forgive-me-god absolutely awful lecturers who make me wanna run away from society, is the minimum attendance percentage.
(I will say that there are always one or two absolutely golden professors in each semester, whose classes I would absolutely attend on my own. The rest can go straight to hell.)
Speaking of, whatever happened to actually improving the campus and having positive reinforcements for learning?
Instead of threatening to take away my degree, fine me, expel me, for not attending classes.
Why don’t you instead improve the infrastructure and make me wanna actually attend the lectures?
If there were good faculties, and a good environment, I would actually want to attend classes. It’s literally that simple.
But what do I get instead?
- Students who are absolutely uninterested and just sitting for the sake of attendance.
- Professors who are also uninterested and just reading from the slides.
Heck, I too would be a hell of a bad professor if I had to teach to a class of 50+ students who don’t even want to be there. Especially in a stingy classroom that feels like a prison cell.
Now imagine this:
- A good environment, with good facilities, so that students or faculty don’t have a second thought about the place they’re in.
- Students who are actually interested in the subject, and want to learn more about it.
- Professors who are actually interested in teaching, and want to share their knowledge with the students.
It’s like: quality invites quality.
Now you may be thinking:
What if the students aren’t interested in literally anything?
Although I would say it’s a skill issue if the children have no interest in anything of meaning. The educational institutions should also have a better way to find out what the students are interested in, and then help them pursue it. Or at the very least, help them grow interest in something, ideally something they naturally shine at.