¶ … Mandatory Class Attendance
Mandatory attendance policies are understandably necessary in elementary, middle, and secondary school, mainly because school attendance itself is mandatory, at least through the age of 16. Adolescents, in particular, are not usually capable of making responsible decisions where responsibilities and obligations conflict with short-term desires. The consequences of allowing high school students to decide for themselves whether or not to attend class would be disastrous for many if not most students. However, by the time students enter college, mandatory attendance policies are unnecessary. In principle, mandatory attendance policy conflicts with self responsibility; it conflicts with contemporary learning theory; and there are better alternatives to encourage students to attend class if it is beneficial to them than mandatory attendance policies that discriminate against students who do not need or benefit from attending class more than they want to.
Mandatory Attendance Policy Conflicts with Self Responsibility
College attendance (unlike high school) is entirely voluntary in the first place. Therefore, it would seem unnecessary and inappropriate to require class attendance in programs that are purely voluntary. By the time students enter college, they are either already fully capable of making adult...
In that sense, mandatory class attendance policies conflict with individual autonomy as well as with one of the main purposes of the college experience: to develop and mature partly based on learning how to deal with problems independently. Part of the learning process is learning how one learns best and mandatory class attendance policies deny students that opportunity to a great degree.
Mandatory Attendance Policy Conflicts with Contemporary Learning Theory
Contemporary learning theorists understand that different people learn best in very different settings and in different ways. Among the types of differences in learning styles and preferences are issues of learning better from independent studying rather than in a lecture-based setting, and learning at different times of day rather than necessarily when classes might be scheduled. Mandatory class attendance policies may be conducive to learning for students who benefit the most from the classroom lecture-based experience, but they are not necessarily conducive to optimal learning for students who prefer to study independently or who are not naturally inclined to focus intellectually at the times that classes happen to be scheduled, particularly in the case of morning classes.
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