When your institution refunds $250-500K back to the federal government each year, you realize how important it is to take attendance. When I worked at a small private college in the south, our faculty hated taking attendance (hmmm.....sounds familiar).They really hated it when they were promised X but received Y instead because of budget cuts. Why was the budget cut? Well, students were leaving during the semester and we could not tell the feds exactly when the student left. So the feds wanted ALL of their money back. By taking attendance, we could keep some of that money when we could show dates the student attended.
Simple rule of thumb: Just shut up and take the attendance. There are more important things to be concerned with taking a stand on.
- Ryan from Rising Sun
This is exactly right, and something I didn't think of yesterday.
ReplyDeleteNow it makes sense.
ReplyDeleteIf the students in the back are still unhappy, let them know that this is their introduction to Life and government regulations (i.e. - The Golden Rule. The one with the gold makes the rules.)
"There are more important things to be concerned with taking a stand on."
ReplyDeleteThat was my response to the parking bruhaha up here in the naked north.
Oh, absolutely! If funding depends on attendance, take attendance. Up here in the frozen north, at least at my institution, funding depends on how many people are still in your class by the drop date. The province doesn't care if they never set foot in the class. If they did care, I'd play Attendance Cop every morning. I'd explain to my students that since funding depends on attendance, I will be sending the class list around every morning, please sign beside your name.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wouldn't be working too hard to validate those signatures.
Oh yeah! Forgot about that. This year, my school is going to start going after the FA scammers.
ReplyDeleteAh, the motherfucking federal government. You can have cost overruns up the ass for some weapons system, but Unkie Sam IMMEDIATLY swipes the cash back because Junior Johnson the Third skipped out of class too many times. I fart in their general direction in cases like this.
ReplyDeleteState funding is an issue for us, too, and given how much that has dropped in the past few decades, I'll do what is needed to help my school get the dribs and drabs left. As at Merely's institution, the issue for us is not so much whether all the people registered for the class are in the classroom, as whether all the people who are regularly showing up in the classroom are officially registered as of a certain date. That's not usually a problem in the gen ed courses I teach, but I'm perfectly willing to double-check.
ReplyDeleteBy the same token, I'm willing to do what I can to help the school keep federal money for seats that the school did, after all, reserve for particular students, whether or not they made full use of the opportunity. If that means making a small effort to be able to pinpoint when the student last showed the slightest sign of interest in the class, either by showing up in the classroom, or, in classes with an online component, logging on to post something, I'm quite willing to do that.
At my last job we had to turn in attendance every day for just this purpose.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I still cannot understand professors who keep track of how many minutes a student is tardy (even if it's the first time and not likely to be a habit), or who write down when somebody leaves class and when they return from a bathroom break. Yes, this allows you to deduct points but it seems like it would be a lot of wasted effort and time.
I'm only being a bit facetious as well. The last two times I've been on the receiving end of faculty orientation, teachers near me during the attendance discussion described their in depth systems of removing points based upon minutes of class missed. I just don't care that much. I have them sign a sign in sheet, that I keep in a notebook, and I have record of the days they attended class. If they miss something important their grade is gonna tank whether I take away five extra points for a tardy or not.