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 let’s 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 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 learn regularly and catch up with their peers?
The most common argument of “students will not attend classes if there is no minimum attendance requirement”… well, so what? Let them attend if they want to. Aren’t Universities supposed to teach and sharpen my skills and prove it by testing me and notarizing it in the name of a college degree?
I don’t remember when the definition of universities included forcing nanny services down people’s throats to make students forcefully attend the classes they paid for, even if they aren’t interested in attending them. The only reason I have to sit through dingy, badly designed “classrooms,” with god-forgive-me 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, or fine/expel me for not attending classes.
Why can’t they instead:
- improve the infrastructure
- let students choose the classes they want to attend
- have engaging professors who actually want to teach (this would be a byproduct of having students choosing classes that they’re interested in, so professors would be motivated to teach as well)
But what do we get instead?
- Students who are absolutely uninterested and are sitting just for the sake of attendance.
- Professors who are also uninterested and just reading from 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 sub-par classroom, which has the energy of a morgue.
Now imagine this:
- A good environment, so that the 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. (for their own reasons)
- Professors who are actually interested in teaching, and want to share their knowledge with the students.
Teaching can only be effective when both the students and the professors are interested in the subject. if either of them is not interested, the whole process becomes a waste of time. thus we must let students choose the classes they’re interested in, and let professors teach the subjects they want to teach.
Now you may be thinking:
What if the students (or my children) aren’t interested in literally anything?
Although I’d say it’s a skill issue if a person has absolutely 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. If not, maybe try cultivating some interest in them, instead of forcing them to attend classes they don’t care about.