This post explains how attendance works at Amrita University, as of 2026. The system is complicated enough to deserve a post, and I hope this helps students who are new to it. It also helps my sanity while I work on sad.nithitsuki.com, a tool I made to keep track of attendance.
The Basics
Let's look at a screenshot of the attendance portal at Amrita University: students.amrita.edu/client/class-attendance
I have redacted the faculty names. The blue text that says "(No-Duty-Leave %)" was added by an extension.
Here are the simple rules for this table:
- Total = Present + Absent
Here, Present is the number of classes you physically attended, and Absent is the number of classes you missed, regardless of the reason. Total is the total number of classes held.
The non-simple rules are:
- Percentage = Present + DutyLeave Total * 100
or, written another way:
- Percentage = Present + DutyLeave (Present + Duty_Leave) + (Absent - Duty_Leave) * 100
This means that "Percentage" is not simply the percentage of classes you attended versus the ones you missed. Instead, it is the percentage of classes you effectively attended, where "effectively" means the classes you attended plus the classes you missed but received duty leave for, divided by the total number of classes held.
To make this easier to understand, let's define a few more variables:
- Effective_Present = Present + DutyLeave
- Effective_Absent = Absent - DutyLeave
Then we can rewrite the formula as:
- Effective_Percentage = Effective_Present Effective_Present + Effective_Absent * 100
Effective_Percentage is the same as the "Percentage" column in the attendance portal. This is the value that matters to most students, because it determines whether they are eligible to write exams. The eligibility cutoff is 75%, which means that if a student's Effective_Percentage is below 75%, they are not eligible to write their exams.
Notice that I have not mentioned Medical Leave until now. That is intentional, because it is not part of the formula used to calculate the percentage. Medical Leave is a separate category of leave that is not counted as either Present or Absent, and it does not affect Effective_Percentage. However, it is still important to track Medical Leave, because it can be used to justify absences as explained in the next section.
What Is Medical Leave?
If the effective percentage falls below 75%, the student will be flagged by the exam cell as "Not Eligible" to write their exams. In that case, usually, some faculty members will review the student's attendance records and calculate this value:
- EffectivePercWithMedical = Effective_Present + MedicalLeave Total * 100
If this value is above 75%, the student will be marked as "Eligible" to write their exams. Otherwise, they will be added to a list of students who are "Not Eligible" to write their exams. That list is then circulated throughout the university, and the students on it must go to the exam cell and explain their situation.
How Many Classes Can I Skip (hypothetically)?
The number of classes you can skip depends on how many classes have already been held and how many you have already missed. The formula for calculating the number of classes you can still skip is:
- Currently_Skippable_Classes = floor( total 3 ) - Effictive_Absent
where floor( total 3 ) is the total number of classes that could be skipped till date asssuming you haven't skipped any. This means that for every 3 classes held, you are allowed to miss 1 class without affecting your eligibility to write exams (think of 75% as 3 out of 4 classes). However, if you have already missed some classes, the number of classes you can still skip will be reduced accordingly.